Coefficient Giving

Coefficient Giving is an American philanthropic advising and funding organisation, founded in September 2011 as the Open Philanthropy Project — a joint initiative between Good Ventures, the private foundation of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, and GiveWell, the charity evaluator co-founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld in 2007. The organisation operated under the Open Philanthropy name from 2014 and became fully independent in 2017; in November 2025 it was rebranded Coefficient Giving. As of June 2025, it has directed more than $4 billion in grants across global health, scientific research, pandemic preparedness, AI risk mitigation, and farm animal welfare. In 2024 alone it made over $650 million in grants. Its current CEO is Alexander Berger; the board includes Moskovitz, Tuna, and Karnofsky alongside Divesh Makan.

Founding arc and EA alignment

The founding arc runs through GiveWell Labs, launched in September 2011 as a joint research initiative between GiveWell and Good Ventures. Tuna had joined GiveWell's board in April 2011; the collaboration formalised into GiveWell Labs that same year, renamed to the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014. Karnofsky served as co-CEO until 2023. Moskovitz and Tuna are the youngest couple to sign the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Giving Pledge, having done so in 2010 after being influenced by Peter Singer's work on effective giving. Good Ventures remains the primary funding partner; it has no full-time staff of its own, directing grants according to Coefficient Giving's recommendations.

Coefficient Giving is closely aligned with the effective altruism movement: several EA leaders serve on its board and the organisation's cause-selection methodology — importance (scale), neglectedness (relative resource allocation), and tractability (likelihood of philanthropic contribution) — is the EA prioritisation framework applied at philanthropic scale. The November 2025 rebrand to Coefficient Giving marked an expansion from single-donor advising to a multi-donor model: CEO Berger described the name as "coefficient is a multiplier" — the "co-" nodding to collaboration with other givers, the "efficient" holding the north star of effectiveness. The organisation now operates 13 cause-specific funds open to multiple donors; in 2024 it directed more than $100 million from non-Good Ventures donors, a figure it more than doubled in 2025.

Navigating Transformative AI — the AI grantmaking programme

Coefficient Giving's AI grantmaking runs through the Navigating Transformative AI fund, the successor to Open Philanthropy's Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence programme; the fund's name change mirrors the top-level rebrand and widens the frame slightly from existential risk to "work that helps humanity to successfully navigate the transition to transformative AI." The programme supports three areas: technical alignment research (interpretability, evaluations, scalable oversight), AI governance and policy, and AI safety field-building. On the governance and policy side, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) has received more than $57 million in Open Philanthropy funding, making it the fund's most prominent single governance grantee. The 2025 Technical AI Safety RFP committed approximately $40 million toward academic labs and independent safety research organisations. The AI Governance RFP specifies six focus areas: technical AI governance, policy development, strategic analysis and threat modelling, frontier company policy, international AI governance, and law — all framed explicitly around mitigating global catastrophic risks from transformative AI.

Community and field-building grantees — the corpus connection

The Navigating Transformative AI fund's field-building line extends to grassroots AI safety community groups, the portion of the programme most directly relevant to this corpus. AI Safety South Africa (AISSA), the Cape Town-based capacity-building hub aiming to develop AI safety skills and community across the African continent, lists Coefficient Giving among its principal funders and partners alongside the Cooperative AI Foundation, UCT AI Initiative, and EA South Africa. BAISH (Buenos Aires AI Safety Hub), the largest AI safety community in Argentina, has received $14,500+ in Open Philanthropy grants and is listed as a Coefficient Giving grantee via the Navigating Transformative AI fund's AI safety field-building stream. Both are in-corpus local-group entities; both carry Coefficient Giving as a named funder — establishing the direct connection between the funder and the grassroots AI safety layer this corpus tracks.

Position in the corpus funder slice

Within this corpus's funder slice, Coefficient Giving fills a specific structural slot that no existing entry occupies. It is the largest single dedicated funder of AI safety and AI-risk-mitigation work globally, operating at a scale that dwarfs the entire 2023 Public Interest AI coalition's $200 million collective commitment. It is also distinctly positioned relative to the corpus's other tech-fortune-anchored funders: where the Omidyar Network operates through a dual LLC-grantmaking structure and incubates spin-off foundations, and where Craig Newmark Philanthropies directs its AI-good work through journalism and cybersecurity, Coefficient Giving functions as the primary philanthropic anchor of the EA-aligned AI safety movement — coordinating technical research organisations, policy think tanks, and community field-building within an ecosystem organised around existential-risk mitigation. That orientation places it at the distinctly different end of the corpus's AI funder spectrum from the democratic-participation, digital-rights, and labour-advocacy funders that dominate the funder slice; and from the broad civil-society-mobilising orientation of the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, or Luminate. Its presence in this corpus rests on its field-building grants to in-corpus local groups rather than on a shared civil-society framing.