Open Philanthropy is a research and grantmaking foundation that makes grants based on the doctrine of
effective altruism. It was founded as a partnership between
GiveWell and
Good Ventures. Its current chief executive officer is Alexander Berger, and its main funders are
Cari Tuna and
Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz says that their wealth, worth $16 billion, "belongs to the world. We intend not to have much when we die."[1][2]
History
Moskovitz co-founded
Facebook and later
Asana, becoming a billionaire in the process.[1] He and Tuna, his wife, were inspired by
Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save, and became the youngest couple to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s
Giving Pledge, promising to give away most of their money.[3][4] Tuna quit her journalist job at The Wall Street Journal[4] to focus on philanthropy full-time,[3] and the couple started the
Good Ventures foundation in 2011. The organization partnered with
GiveWell, a charity evaluator founded by
Holden Karnofsky and
Elie Hassenfeld.[5] The partnership named itself the "Open Philanthropy Project" in 2014, and began operating independently in 2017.[6][7] Good Ventures holds the funds and distributes them according to recommendations by Open Philanthropy.[8] As of 2024, Open Philanthropy has made close to $3 billion in grants.[9]
Operations
Open Philanthropy's grantmaking is based on the principles of
effective altruism.[2][5][10] The organization makes grants across a variety of focus areas, with the goal of “help[ing] others as much as [it] can”.[11] They calculate impact for some programs using
back-of-the-envelope calculations, and decide which opportunities to fund using a “bar” for
cost-effectiveness.[12] At the same time, they consider their work "high-risk philanthropy", and expect "that most of [their] work will fail to have an impact".[13] In 2023, Open Philanthropy recommended more than $750 million in grants.[14]
Focus areas
Open Philanthropy’s focus areas are split across two portfolios: Global Health and Wellbeing and Global Catastrophic Risks. A few areas fall outside these portfolios.[15]
Historically, a large fraction of funding in this portfolio went toward charities recommended by GiveWell. More recently, Open Philanthropy has pushed to identify causes that could leverage funding to “get more humanitarian impact per dollar”, leading to the creation of several new programs (in areas such as public health and innovation policy) and leaving GiveWell as a smaller portion of the portfolio.[18]
Global health and development
Open Philanthropy's investments in
global health and
development include efforts to cure iodine deficiencies, prevent malaria,[19][20] and scale up vaccine production.[21] Of their global health and development giving, Tuna said, “I am still optimistic that we can do better than just giving money to poor people, but in the meantime, we’re doing a lot of just giving money to poor people.”[5]
Animal welfare
Holden Karnofsky has claimed that Open Philanthropy "is the largest funder in the world of farm animal welfare", including investing in
alternative proteins and animal welfare advocacy.[22] In 2016, Open Philanthropy made an investment in
Impossible Foods to support the development of non-animal meats.[23] It is also a patron of
The Good Food Institute.[24] Research done by Open Philanthropy includes an investigation of the economic viability of
cultivated meat.[24]
Over $250 million to
Malaria Consortium, for seasonal malaria chemoprevention programs in countries including Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Togo, and Mozambique.[26]
Over $48 million (and up to $64.7 million) to
Evidence Action to support the Dispensers for Safe Water program, which installs free chlorine dispensers near water sources to improve water safety and avert deaths from diarrheal diseases.[27]
Over $47 million to
GiveDirectly,[13] partially for research to compare the effectiveness of giving money with more traditional developmental aid,[10] and including at least $16 million to be given directly to people in extreme poverty in Kenya and Uganda.[28]
Over $40 million to
The Humane League, to advocate for better conditions for egg-laying hens and broiler chickens.[29]
$500,000 to California
YIMBY.[33][34] Open Philanthropy was the first institutional funder of the YIMBY movement.[22]
Global Catastrophic Risks
Under this portfolio, Open Philanthropy supports organizations aimed at tackling
global catastrophic risks. This category includes over $200 million given for
biosecurity and pandemic preparedness,[35] and over $370 million for mitigating
potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.[36] The organization tends to prioritize interventions aimed at reducing risks with the potential to "kill enough people to threaten civilization as we know it",[5] because preventing such risks is expected to save the most lives. Some have claimed that by "flooding" money into biosecurity, Open Philanthropy is "absorbing much of the field’s experienced research capacity, focusing the attention of experts on this narrow, extremely unlikely, aspect of biosecurity risk".[37] Other biosecurity experts, however, have counseled against "failures of imagination", overreliance on historical precedents, and other ways of thinking that could lead people to underestimate catastrophic biorisk.[38]
$11.3 million to the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design to develop a universal flu vaccine.[39][40][30]
About $23 million to the Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF) for the purchase of
Wytham Abbey as a venue for hosting conferences and other events related to global catastrophic risk.[41][42] In 2024, Open Philanthropy announced that after evaluating the cost-effectiveness of the space, they asked EVF to sell it, and that proceeds from the sale will be distributed to other EVF projects.[43]
$5.5 million to launch the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at
UC Berkeley.[45]
Past focus areas
Past focus areas of Open Philanthropy have included
criminal justice reform (which spun out as a new organization in 2021[46]) and US
macroeconomic stabilization policy (which ceased to be a focus in 2021,[47] though European macroeconomic policy grants have been made more recently).
Sample grants
Grants in past focus areas include:
$50 million to Just Impact Advisors, to advise philanthropists and make grants related to criminal justice.[48]
$3 million to the
Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project, to “reduce incarceration and correctional spending while maintaining or improving public safety and concentrating prison beds on high level offenders" at the state level.[5]