Coefficient Giving Funds Redwood Research for AI Safety
Coefficient Giving, powered by a $36 million grant, funds Redwood Research—one of the organizations OpenAI enlisted after its agents breached Hugging Face. This funding supports independent scrutiny of frontier AI, which Coefficient's CEO Alexander Berger predicts will add approximately $40 billion annually to American philanthropy. This figure is contingent on successful listings by Anthropic and OpenAI.
The Role of Philanthropy in AI Safety
Berger emphasizes the speed and incentive advantages that make philanthropy well-suited for building guardrails around AI development. He argues, "It’s not something where government is going to move as fast," and adds that self-regulation within labs may not always be effective.
The Historical Context
Initially skeptical of Coefficient's focus on AI, Berger now considers their early investments in this area to have been prescient. He references a May essay by Nan Ransohoff from Stripe, which identifies this as a "third wave" of American philanthropy, driven by the combined assets of OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic founders, and Anthropic employees estimated at $370 billion.