Carnegie Corporation of New York

Carnegie Corporation of New York is one of the oldest major private foundations in the United States, founded on June 9, 1911 by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie with the mission to "promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." Carnegie's initial endowment has grown to approximately $4.1 billion as of 2022. Louise Richardson, a political scientist and counter-terrorism scholar who previously served as vice-chancellor of Oxford University, became president in January 2023 following the tenure of Vartan Gregorian. Under Richardson the Corporation has framed its priorities around reducing political polarization in the United States while sustaining its long-running international peace and security mandate.

Carnegie organises its grantmaking across three programme areas: Education, which aims to expand civic participation and upward mobility through learning; Strengthening U.S. Democracy, which addresses elections, civic education, immigration pathways, and community service; and International Peace and Security, which focuses on conflict prevention, migration, and the role of non-state actors in governance. Most of the corpus-relevant work flows through the Democracy programme.

The Democracy program and its AI-adjacent lane

Carnegie's Strengthening U.S. Democracy programme approved approximately $30.6 million in FY2025 grants across four strategy pillars: elections and governance, state community service, universal civic learning, and legal immigration pathways. The programme's managing director, Geri Mannion, described its scope as deliberately spanning the full voter-engagement continuum and sustaining grantees through non-election years rather than concentrating capital in final-stretch campaign spending.

Within that frame, Carnegie has added a specific AI-and-elections lane. The Campaign Legal Center — the nonpartisan legal organisation focused on campaign finance reform and voting-rights litigation — received a two-year $300,000 Democracy grant in 2024 specifically for work on "how AI can influence elections," with Mannion naming AI deepfake technology's capacity to "promote conspiracy theories before and during the 2024 election" as the driver. Carnegie also funds Protect Democracy ($450,000 general support, September 2025) — whose work spans election monitoring, media scrutiny, and litigation against democratic backsliding — and the Center for Tech and Civic Life ($1,000,000 general support, December 2025), the nonpartisan election-administration organisation that helps states run digital voter registration and poll-worker programmes and has integrated AI considerations into its election-security work.

Digital citizenship and AI literacy

The most direct AI-good grantmaking in Carnegie's portfolio runs through its digital-citizenship and media-literacy investments. In June 2024 Carnegie approved a $350,000 twelve-month grant to Common Sense Media for an AI ratings system designed to assess "the ethical use, transparency, safety, and impact of AI products for families" — a public-accountability tool bringing consumer-facing scrutiny to the AI products reaching children in homes and schools. That relationship continued with a $1.55 million eighteen-month grant announced in March 2025, supporting development of fifty-four new and updated K–8 media and AI literacy lessons, public-library teen workshops at five pilot locations nationwide, and the 2025 Common Sense Summit on child and family wellbeing in the digital age. The Common Sense Media press release named misinformation, conspiracy theories, and "AI-generated content that make it challenging to distinguish fact from fiction" as the context framing the curriculum redesign. A separate $400,000 grant to the Digital Inquiry Group (June 2025) updated school-based digital literacy resources to include navigating AI across multiple classroom subjects.

The News Literacy Project ($1.2 million general support, December 2025) and iCivics ($2.5 million general support, September 2025) are two further Democracy and Education grantees whose core work — news literacy for students and civic education games for classrooms — has been reshaped by the AI content environment and now integrates AI-literacy components.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

Carnegie's role in the AI-good landscape is more precisely characterised as a funder of the democracy-facing dimension of that landscape than as a funder of the algorithmic-accountability or AI-governance layer that characterises Ford, Open Society, or the Mozilla Foundation. Carnegie's Democracy programme cares about AI primarily through the question of how AI-generated misinformation and electoral manipulation threaten democratic processes and the public's capacity to participate in them — not primarily through the frame of AI corporate governance or civil-society tech oversight. Its grantmaking runs to election-AI litigation, public AI product ratings, and school and library AI literacy programmes.

That framing is a genuine intersection rather than a tangential overlap: a public that cannot evaluate AI-generated political content, or a legal system without tools to address AI electoral manipulation, is a thinner substrate for the grassroots AI-good movement to organise on. Carnegie's investment in that substrate — at a scale of $30-plus million annually across the Democracy programme alone — is what makes it load-bearing for the AI-good landscape even without a dedicated AI governance programme, and distinguishes it from funders whose democracy or AI work sits on a single axis.