Since writing this post, our thinking on this work has evolved in a few important ways.
In particular, what we originally referred to as the Pain Atlas Project is now better understood as part of a broader effort: the development of a Welfare Footprint Atlas. The goal is to enable the generation of structured, comparable, and inspectable estimates of animal welfare across products, production systems, and species.
The key shift is not simply the use of AI, but the ability to produce first-pass estimates at scale, making it easier to identify where suffering is concentrated and where interventions may have the greatest impact — while keeping assumptions explicit and open to revision.
We’ve updated the main text of the post to reflect this evolution, and we’re continuing to develop the underlying tools and methods that make this possible.
Update (April 2026)
Since writing this post, our thinking on this work has evolved in a few important ways.
In particular, what we originally referred to as the Pain Atlas Project is now better understood as part of a broader effort: the development of a Welfare Footprint Atlas. The goal is to enable the generation of structured, comparable, and inspectable estimates of animal welfare across products, production systems, and species.
The key shift is not simply the use of AI, but the ability to produce first-pass estimates at scale, making it easier to identify where suffering is concentrated and where interventions may have the greatest impact — while keeping assumptions explicit and open to revision.
We’ve updated the main text of the post to reflect this evolution, and we’re continuing to develop the underlying tools and methods that make this possible.