Global Catastrophic Risks Grantmaking

Global Catastrophic Risks Grantmaking

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Coefficient Giving
Last Updated: October 16, 2025

Summary

The Global Catastrophic Risks Grantmaking program focuses on funding initiatives that address severe threats to humanity, such as pandemics and advanced AI risks. The program prioritizes preventive measures and capacity building, emphasizing evidence-based strategies to mitigate these risks. By supporting biosecurity efforts and fostering a community dedicated to reducing global catastrophic threats, the initiative aims to enhance preparedness and create a safer future for all. Open Philanthropy seeks innovative projects that can demonstrate impactful results.

Overview

NOTE: We expect to fund very few proposals that come to us via unsolicited contact. As such, we have no formal process for accepting such proposals and may not respond to inquiries. In general, we expect to identify most giving opportunities via proactive searching and networking. If you would like to suggest that we consider a grant — whether for your project or someone else’s — please contact us. Open Philanthropy Project Focus Areas So far, the focus areas we have selected fall into one of two broad categories: Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) and Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR). We summarize the key differences between these portfolios as follows: While GCR grants tend to be evaluated based on something like “How much this grant reduces the chance of a catastrophic event that endangers billions of people”, GHW grants tend to be evaluated based on something like “How much this grant increases health (denominated in e.g. life-years) and/or wellbeing, worldwide.” The GHW team places greater weight on evidence, precedent, and track record in its giving; the GCR team tends to focus on problems and interventions where evidence and track records are often comparatively thin. (That said, the GHW team does support a significant amount of low-probability but high-upside work like policy advocacy and scientific research.) The GCR team’s work could be hugely important, but it’s very hard to answer questions like “How will we know whether this work is on track to have an impact?” We can track intermediate impacts and learn to some degree, but some key premises likely won’t become very clear for decades or more. (Our primary goal is for catastrophic events not to happen, and to the extent we succeed, it can be hard to learn from the absence of events.) By contrast, we generally expect the work of the GHW team to be more likely to result in recognizable impact on a given ~10-year time frame, and to be more amenable to learning and changing course as we go. Global Catastrophic Risks Focus Areas Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness - Pandemics have the potential to cause significant, and perhaps unprecedented, harm.We’re interested in supporting activities that could reduce the threat of a major global disruption.We have long believed that natural pandemics represent one of the biggest current risks to global welfare and stability, and the risks from engineered pandemics — whether via accidents or misuse — may grow in the future. Though we have worked in this field since 2015, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the enormous potential costs, in terms of lives lost and economic damage, and strengthened our resolve in ensuring nothing worse be allowed to come to pass. We’re interested in supporting the strengthening of disease surveillance, the governance of dual use research, policy development, or other activities that could reduce the threat of a major global disruption. We see relatively little philanthropic support in this area, and believe that philanthropy may have an important role to play, distinct from that of government.Forecasting - Many decisions affecting millions of people are made by small groups, using opaque processes with unknown track records. Quantitative forecasting enables decision-making with a higher degree of transparency, accountability, and accuracy. We seek to support people and organizations in the forecasting community, in order to improve how crucial decisions are made.Over the past few decades, quantitative approaches to prediction and decision-making have seen tremendous success in sectors as diverse as finance, sports, and retail. And yet, in many other domains, individuals tasked with decisions that will affect the lives of millions or even billions of people — among them politicians, government officials, managers, and scientists — routinely decide based on idiosyncratic processes, and vague, qualitative assessments of the future.As a result, when disaster strikes — wars, pandemics, terrorism — it’s hard to evaluate whether the institutions tasked with preventing or managing these events could have foreseen them. This limits our abilities to learn from such events in a structured way, and gives us little guidance on whom to trust with such decisions and to what degree.Alternatively, we can use quantitative forecasting, which expresses uncertainty about future events in the form of probabilities, and keeps score of the accuracy of these forecasts once the events have happened. The expression of probabilities reduces communication error resulting from vague qualitative assessments of the future. Pioneering work by psychologist Philip Tetlock demonstrated that selecting excellent forecasters, training them (using e.g. calibration training), and aggregating their forecasts can make these forecasts more accurate, including in high-stakes situations (for example, national elections or geopolitical crises).At Open Philanthropy, we’ve found forecasting to be a useful tool for our own decision-making; our grantmaking staff often make predictions about core outcomes for grants they approve. And we’ve been making grants to forecasting-related projects since 2015; we’ve supported research by Tetlock and the Forecasting Research Institute, as well as forecasting platforms such as Metaculus, Hypermind, and INFER (through our grant to ARLIS). Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building - Catastrophic risks to humanity are highly neglected relative to the danger they pose.We want to increase the number of people who aim to prevent catastrophic events, and help them to achieve their goals.We believe that scope-sensitive giving often means focusing on the reduction of global catastrophic risks — those which could endanger billions of people. We support organizations and projects that connect and support people who want to work on these issues, with a special focus on biosecurity and risks from advanced AI. In doing so, we hope to grow and empower the community of people focused on addressing threats to humanity and protecting the future of human civilization.The work we fund in this area is primarily focused on identifying and supporting people who are or could eventually become helpful partners, critics, and grantees.This team recently changed its name; it was formerly known as “Effective Altruism Community Growth (Longtermism)”.Navigating Transformative AI - Advances in AI could lead to extremely positive developments, but could also potentially pose risks from intentional misuse or catastrophic accidents.We aim to support research and strategic work that could reduce risks and improve preparedness.It appears possible that the coming decades will see substantial progress in artificial intelligence, potentially even to the point where machines come to outperform humans in many or nearly all intellectual domains, though it is difficult or impossible to make confident forecasts in this area. These advances could lead to extremely positive developments, but could also potentially pose risks from misuse, accidents, or harmful societal effects, which could plausibly reach the level of global catastrophic risks. We’re interested in supporting technical research that could reduce the risk of accidents, as well as strategic and policy work that has the potential to improve society’s preparedness for major advances in AI. We support: Technical AI safety research aimed at making advanced AI systems more trustworthy, robust, controllable, and aligned AI governance and policy work to develop frameworks for safe, secure, and responsibly managed AI development Capacity building to grow and strengthen the field of researchers and practitioners working on these challenges.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. While we almost never fund unsolicited proposals, we do run programs that solicit funding requests from individuals, groups, and organizations.