Effective Altruism Funds: Transformative AI Fund
Charity

EA Funds

Transformative AI Fund

The Transformative AI Fund aims to help humanity reduce the risk of catastrophe and navigate the transition to advanced AI well by providing fast, early-stage funding to new projects, individuals, or organisations.

Reducing global catastrophic risks
EA Funds’ Transformative AI Fund is a successor to EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund. While the Transformative AI Fund has a similar remit, the fund has a different team and has not yet been evaluated by GWWC.
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What problem is the Transformative AI Fund working on?

AI systems are getting more capable quickly, and may soon match or exceed people on most cognitive work. Systems that capable could cause harm at a global scale, through catastrophic accidents, misuse, or rapid concentration of power. Avoiding those outcomes is necessary but not sufficient for the transition to go well. It also matters what kind of world comes out of it, and whether the systems being built have experiences that matter morally. These problems get little attention relative to the stakes, partly because they sit far from commercial and political incentives.

What projects does the Transformative AI Fund support?

The Transformative AI Fund has a broad remit to fund work on the transition to transformative AI. It supports:

  • Individuals, new organisations, and existing organisations getting a new project off the ground, typically with grants in the $10k-$150k range, rarely exceeding $300k
  • Work that directly reduces catastrophic risks from advanced AI, including technical AI safety research, policy analysis, forecasting, advocacy, and demonstration projects
  • Training for researchers and practitioners, and supporting infrastructure such as field-building
  • Projects on other neglected implications of transformative AI, such as flourishing futures and digital sentience, which the fund expects to be a minority of its grants

You can learn more about the Transformative AI Fund and the work it does in the fund’s launch announcement post.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Transformative AI Fund?

The Transformative AI Fund was launched by EA Funds in August 2026. We haven't evaluated it yet and hence don't currently include it among our recommended programmes. We include it as a supported program because it works on one of the problems we consider most pressing, and because we generally think pooled funds run by specialised grantmakers are the best way for donors to support work on global catastrophic risks, where the field develops quickly and impact is hard to measure.

While we evaluated its predecessor, EA Funds' Long-Term Future Fund, in 2023 and decided to rely on it for our recommendations in global catastrophic risk reduction, we don't think that conclusion carries over to the Transformative AI Fund: the fund has new full-time fund managers and a slightly different remit, focused exclusively on transformative AI. The change to full-time leadership is part of a wider EA Funds restructuring intended to strengthen each fund's grantmaking, though it's too early to say what it will mean for the Transformative AI Fund.

We understand that the Long-Term Future Fund's managers chose to allocate roughly $1M of the fund's remaining balance to the Transformative AI Fund that they otherwise could have granted themselves, which we consider a positive signal.

We intend to evaluate the Transformative AI Fund as soon as it has a grantmaking track record we can review, most likely in early 2027.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.