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Coefficient Giving
September 9, 2026

We’re Urgently Scaling Our Work on AI and Biosecurity

Emily Oehlsen

By Emily Oehlsen

I began leading Coefficient Giving’s grantmaking on AI safety and biosecurity 18 months ago. I think we’re at a critical moment: transformative AI may arrive soon, and the world isn’t ready for it. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been changing how we work so that we can act at the speed the situation demands.

This post is an update on where we are today: we’re giving substantially more, making faster decisions, and supporting our grantees as they raise their ambitions. We also want to encourage more ambitious new AI safety initiatives, and today we’re launching Project Tailwind to that end.

Our giving

In 2024, Coefficient Giving committed $168 million across our technical AI safety, security, and fieldbuilding work. In 2025, we more than doubled that to $351 million, and this year we’re on track to commit over $1 billion. In August alone, we committed $352 million across this portfolio. We’ve also grown our biosecurity grantmaking from $30 million in 2024 and $65 million in 2025, to more than $150 million so far this year.

Of course, our ultimate goal isn’t to move money; it’s to make progress on the most important and neglected problems in navigating transformative AI and reducing biological risk. When there are tradeoffs between moving money and having impact, we prioritize the latter. This means we expect to keep saying no to many proposals, even good ones, because we want to prioritize our most important bets. Even so, the dollar figures are a proxy for the fact that we’re finding many opportunities we’re excited about, and saying yes to them faster than before. And we aim to keep scaling as long as we keep finding opportunities worth backing.

Why we’re going bigger and faster

Across CG, we’ve been trying to speed up grantmaking. A few factors drive the urgency of our AI work in particular.

First, many experts have updated toward thinking transformative AI may arrive sooner than they previously expected, potentially within the next few years. My own timelines have also shortened, largely in response to rapid progress in capabilities, the rise of agentic coding, unprecedented revenue growth at frontier AI companies, and my own day-to-day use of AI. I’m uncertain about these projections, and I think most of our work is worth doing even under long timelines, but from what I can see, the people who’ve been taking short timelines to powerful AI seriously are looking increasingly correct. There’s a lot of impactful work that urgently needs doing, and we’re eager to fund more of it.

Second, we’re planning for a potential wave of new philanthropic funding entering the fields where we work. It’s unclear how much money will materialize and when, but we expect philanthropic capital to grow, and we want the ecosystem to be ready. By seeding a larger, more robust field now, we hope to position organizations to make cost-effective use of funds in the future. Organizations need calendar time to expand, hire, and make plans, so resources received today are worth more than resources arriving in two years. As a result, CG is scaling across the board: in addition to the expansion of our AI and biosecurity work I described above, we’re also significantly growing our giving to global health and farm animal welfare this year.

What we’ve changed

We’re supporting our existing grantees as they raise their ambitions. We want our strongest grantees to have room to run at their top priorities and feel supported by us to be more ambitious. This often means encouraging our grantees to think about how they could spend more to have an even greater impact, including larger budgets for compute to enable important technical research and for higher salaries to compete for top talent. To be clear, we don’t think every organization or idea should scale. But when we believe in a team, we want to fund them generously and set them up for success.

We’re giving bigger grants. The majority of the GCR grants over $20 million we’ve ever made have been made this calendar year. And where we have high conviction, we want to bet big from the start: we recently approved $160 million for Resolution, our largest ever AI safety grant, to support a new organization led by Geoffrey Irving scaling rigorous alignment research.

We’re making faster decisions. We’ve shortened grant investigations — both so each grantmaker can get through more grants, and so grantees spend less time waiting on us. We’ve changed our approval structure so more decisions happen closer to the grantmakers with the most context (a typical grant now needs active sign-off from only one person in addition to the primary grant investigator), and we’ve cut out steps that were adding delay, especially for grants clearly above our bar. For instance, we recently approved an initial grant of $10 million to help Fields Medal recipient Jacob Tsimerman establish an institute encouraging top mathematicians to work on AI safety; the grant was approved 12 days after we had the first conversation.

We’re more proactive in seeding new organizations. When we think an organization should exist and doesn’t, we consider it part of our jobs to help create it. We think there are many people, especially among staff currently working at frontier AI companies, who could have more impact by starting their own projects. Ryan Fugate led our work on Project Tailwind to find and fund would-be-founders of ambitious AI safety initiatives.

We’re planning for short timelines specifically. Claire Zabel launched a team last year focused on figuring out what we should do if transformative AI arrives within the next few years. Their work complements our other AI teams, which are organized thematically and hedge across different possible timelines.

We’re hiring aggressively. The above changes enable each grantmaker to do much more, but that alone won’t keep pace with our plans. We remain capacity-constrained and the main thing preventing us from scaling our impact is staff time. We want to keep growing, especially by adding experienced, talented people who can set strategy and build new programs; I’m particularly glad that we recently hired Caleb Watney to lead our AI policy work in DC. You can keep an eye out here for future roles as they open up, or fill out our Expression of Interest here.

I’m incredibly grateful to lead this team with George Rosenfeld, deputy director of our GCR work, who has made much of the above possible; in particular, George and Ryan led a project this spring to speed up our grantmaking processes. Claire, Luke Muehlhauser and Andrew Snyder-Beattie also deserve credit for their prescient work at CG: they’ve been focused on these problems for many years, well before the rest of the world caught up.

Aiming higher

We hope to continue supporting existing and new grantees as they raise their ambitions, while balancing the need to make progress on neglected, time-intensive priorities.

Many of our grantees are already scaling rapidly. I’m especially proud of the cases where CG’s grantmakers encouraged grantees to bring us bigger plans. To give two more examples:

  • Redwood Research is a technical research lab with a track record of pioneering important research agendas like alignment-faking and AI control. Redwood’s Chief Scientist Ryan Greenblatt helped conduct an independent investigation of the incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face. CG grantmakers Jake Mendel and Matt MacDermott recently recommended more than $70 million over the next two years to enable them to scale up their work.
  • Epoch AI, which serves as a public source of truth on the trajectory of AI, is roughly tripling its capacity, expanding its benchmarking and data work and adding new programs on the economics of AI. CG grantmakers Catherine Brewer and Luke Muehlhauser recommended a $68 million renewal over 3 years, more than double our previous four years of support.

If you’re reading this from outside our grantee ecosystem, the main message I want to convey is that the fields of AI safety and biosecurity are full of ambitious people doing excellent work, and we need many more of them. There are more promising projects than there are people to work on them, and many ways to get involved.