Iāve seen a lot of posts that we need a lot more AI safety grantmakers. I feel like I want to do a bit of rough math and just see if thatās the case. There is this estimate for the number of FTEs in AI safety by Stephen Mcaleese from Sept 2025 and 2022. Letās extrapolate exponential growth and say there are ~1400 FTEs on AI safety right now. Letās also assume from Julian Hazellās post that there are ~50 full-time AI safety grantmakers (though I think itās probably a bit more than that, given CG, Astralis, Astera, Longview, SFF, independent grantmakers, FLI, UK AISI, ARIA, AISTOF, Navigation Fundpeople at Schmidt, Macroscopic, etc., LTFF, Bluedot grants, Manifund, Tarbell, etc.).
From what I know about CG and other grantmakers, the people there are quite talented, and I would speculate are more talented than the average grantee.
Right off the bat, that means that right now, about 28 FTEs are working in AIS per grantmaker. Not to mention, a lot of the people who work full-time in AIS are working at frontier labs or other for-profit companies like Goodfire or in government (like UK AISI, CAISI), who donāt need grantmakers to evaluate/āfund their work. But we can ignore all those and just stick with the 28 FTE number.
I think I would expect the average grantmaker to be able to handle more than that, especially since an average organization usually has ~10 FTEs on average (I just asked Claude), and I expect a typical grantmaker to handle much more than 3 grants.
Also, I suspect a lot of grants look a lot more like renewals, and so donāt need nearly as much review. For example, Iād expect grants to MATS and Redwood to look a lot more like reviewing their plans and signing off on them.
(I work as a grantmaker at CG, but Iām speaking for myself not Luke here)
FWIW, Iād expect ~1400 FTE to be an underestimate for āhow many FTE work on AI governance/āpolicy or technical AI safetyā.
I donāt have a more up-to-date estimate, sorry. I think Stevenās estimates were off in 2025 (e.g. undercounting lab staff, missing researchers in academia doing AIS-relevant work), and I think his model is weird, so I donāt really trust estimates based on it.
I think that the ratio of grantmakers:people in AIS isnāt that informative for answering the question, āis the number of grantmakers a bottleneckā. (The better ratio is presumably something like, āpeople who could be working in AI safety/āgovernance if they got funding: grantmakersā).
Lots of our grantmaking, and especially strategy-driven creation of new grantees (Lukeās #3 item on what we fund), pulls talent into AI safety/āAI governance, increasing the number of FTEs doing direct work. This is one of our top priority lines of work.
We currently feel more constrained by evaluating or creating new funding opportunities than directing $ to them.
Some kinds of grantmaking are very time-intensive, especially strategy-driven creation of new grantees.
Some renewals can be (and are!) made very quickly, but in other cases we think itās useful for grantmakers to spend longer working with grantees.
Grantmakers can give feedback on granteesā plans, encourage them to expand into new areas or be more ambitious, and help new initiatives go better (e.g., by helping them make key hires, advising on object-level decisions, having conversations about their strategy, and connecting them to relevant people). So renewals arenāt merely a passive āaccept/ārejectā process.
One example of this kind of work is my colleague Abbey working closely with Heron AI Security on a shortlist of pressing problems in infosecurity, and Heronās new programs addressing this.
Since somebody nudged me to reply to this. I didnāt find this reply very convincing.
First, I agree that work pulling people into AI safety is/āwill be more time-consuming. Other than that, though,
I think that the ratio of grantmakers:people in AIS isnāt that informative for answering the question, āis the number of grantmakers a bottleneckā
This seems off to me. Surely youād agree that if the ratio were 1:1 or something, we would say āok, some people who are currently grantmaking need to be doing direct workā. Not everyone can just be funding things.
The better ratio is presumably something like, āpeople who could be working in AI safety/āgovernance if they got funding: grantmakersā
I mean, maybe thatās another one to consider, but it still feels less relevant. A lot of people think that the denominator in this case is infinite/ā(nearly) all humans.
We currently feel more constrained by evaluating or creating new funding opportunities than directing $ to them
I actually donāt think this necessarily implies that we should get a lot more people into grantmaking. This could just mean that there is a lot of money available and that grantmakers should move into roles on the ground (direct work)
I appreciate you raising this and Iām interested to see how people will answer. However, some weak counter-considerations come to mind:
Many grants go to individual independent researchers for relatively short periods of time, requiring a much higher amount of grantmaking time per FTE than other areas (say, global health) - I realize that this is perhaps not that strong of a consideration, given that many grantmakers mainly fund organizations
Grantmakers want the field to keep growing quickly, and I assume ācreating new granteesā is time-consuming. That means that the current ratio of grantmakers to AI safety FTEs is maybe not the best metric
If accurate, that ratio of grantmakers to employed specialists looks rather low compared with what I understand it to be in many other fields, and Iām thinking of fields like space technology which have 75 page grant applications requiring specialist knowledge to evaluate and monitor, and government subsidy programmes whose application volume is sufficiently high to have <5% funding rates and which have painful audit requirements.
Also wonder how much EA organizations use part time external reviewers to evaluate grants, which is the standard way of broadening evaluations and removing bottlenecks? (although I can see getting AI specialists who both work in industry/āresearch and are truly independent might be more challenging)
Iāve seen a lot of posts that we need a lot more AI safety grantmakers. I feel like I want to do a bit of rough math and just see if thatās the case. There is this estimate for the number of FTEs in AI safety by Stephen Mcaleese from Sept 2025 and 2022. Letās extrapolate exponential growth and say there are ~1400 FTEs on AI safety right now. Letās also assume from Julian Hazellās post that there are ~50 full-time AI safety grantmakers (though I think itās probably a bit more than that, given CG, Astralis, Astera, Longview, SFF, independent grantmakers, FLI, UK AISI, ARIA, AISTOF, Navigation Fundpeople at Schmidt, Macroscopic, etc., LTFF, Bluedot grants, Manifund, Tarbell, etc.).
From what I know about CG and other grantmakers, the people there are quite talented, and I would speculate are more talented than the average grantee.
Right off the bat, that means that right now, about 28 FTEs are working in AIS per grantmaker. Not to mention, a lot of the people who work full-time in AIS are working at frontier labs or other for-profit companies like Goodfire or in government (like UK AISI, CAISI), who donāt need grantmakers to evaluate/āfund their work. But we can ignore all those and just stick with the 28 FTE number.
I think I would expect the average grantmaker to be able to handle more than that, especially since an average organization usually has ~10 FTEs on average (I just asked Claude), and I expect a typical grantmaker to handle much more than 3 grants.
Also, I suspect a lot of grants look a lot more like renewals, and so donāt need nearly as much review. For example, Iād expect grants to MATS and Redwood to look a lot more like reviewing their plans and signing off on them.
What am I missing?
(I work as a grantmaker at CG, but Iām speaking for myself not Luke here)
FWIW, Iād expect ~1400 FTE to be an underestimate for āhow many FTE work on AI governance/āpolicy or technical AI safetyā.
I donāt have a more up-to-date estimate, sorry. I think Stevenās estimates were off in 2025 (e.g. undercounting lab staff, missing researchers in academia doing AIS-relevant work), and I think his model is weird, so I donāt really trust estimates based on it.
I think that the ratio of grantmakers:people in AIS isnāt that informative for answering the question, āis the number of grantmakers a bottleneckā. (The better ratio is presumably something like, āpeople who could be working in AI safety/āgovernance if they got funding: grantmakersā).
Lots of our grantmaking, and especially strategy-driven creation of new grantees (Lukeās #3 item on what we fund), pulls talent into AI safety/āAI governance, increasing the number of FTEs doing direct work. This is one of our top priority lines of work.
We currently feel more constrained by evaluating or creating new funding opportunities than directing $ to them.
Some kinds of grantmaking are very time-intensive, especially strategy-driven creation of new grantees.
Some renewals can be (and are!) made very quickly, but in other cases we think itās useful for grantmakers to spend longer working with grantees.
Grantmakers can give feedback on granteesā plans, encourage them to expand into new areas or be more ambitious, and help new initiatives go better (e.g., by helping them make key hires, advising on object-level decisions, having conversations about their strategy, and connecting them to relevant people). So renewals arenāt merely a passive āaccept/ārejectā process.
One example of this kind of work is my colleague Abbey working closely with Heron AI Security on a shortlist of pressing problems in infosecurity, and Heronās new programs addressing this.
Since somebody nudged me to reply to this. I didnāt find this reply very convincing.
First, I agree that work pulling people into AI safety is/āwill be more time-consuming. Other than that, though,
This seems off to me. Surely youād agree that if the ratio were 1:1 or something, we would say āok, some people who are currently grantmaking need to be doing direct workā. Not everyone can just be funding things.
I mean, maybe thatās another one to consider, but it still feels less relevant. A lot of people think that the denominator in this case is infinite/ā(nearly) all humans.
I actually donāt think this necessarily implies that we should get a lot more people into grantmaking. This could just mean that there is a lot of money available and that grantmakers should move into roles on the ground (direct work)
I appreciate you raising this and Iām interested to see how people will answer. However, some weak counter-considerations come to mind:
Many grants go to individual independent researchers for relatively short periods of time, requiring a much higher amount of grantmaking time per FTE than other areas (say, global health) - I realize that this is perhaps not that strong of a consideration, given that many grantmakers mainly fund organizations
Grantmakers want the field to keep growing quickly, and I assume ācreating new granteesā is time-consuming. That means that the current ratio of grantmakers to AI safety FTEs is maybe not the best metric
If accurate, that ratio of grantmakers to employed specialists looks rather low compared with what I understand it to be in many other fields, and Iām thinking of fields like space technology which have 75 page grant applications requiring specialist knowledge to evaluate and monitor, and government subsidy programmes whose application volume is sufficiently high to have <5% funding rates and which have painful audit requirements.
Also wonder how much EA organizations use part time external reviewers to evaluate grants, which is the standard way of broadening evaluations and removing bottlenecks? (although I can see getting AI specialists who both work in industry/āresearch and are truly independent might be more challenging)