Hey! Welcome to the forum and thanks for writing this.
I think this post conflates two different problems. AI safety philanthropic funding (Open Phil, SFF, regranting programs) doesn’t generally flow to frontier labs as discretionary capital; it mostly funds specific projects at academic groups, nonprofits, and small research teams, with defined deliverables (when trust is low) or general funding for a charitable purpose (when trust is high). Frontier-lab safety work is funded by the labs themselves out of revenue. So the principal-agent framing doesn’t really describe the funding landscape we have, and a philanthropic gate wouldn’t touch the actual capital flows we’d care about.
Compute verification (ZKPs of training, hardware-linked attestation, on-chip governance) is extremely promising, but mostly a lever for AI policy, aimed at government regulation of frontier development, not as a grant verification/compliance mechanism. Just in case you’re not familiar, I’d recommend looking at FlexHEG and related work on compute verification and AI assurance.
Hey! Welcome to the forum and thanks for writing this.
I think this post conflates two different problems. AI safety philanthropic funding (Open Phil, SFF, regranting programs) doesn’t generally flow to frontier labs as discretionary capital; it mostly funds specific projects at academic groups, nonprofits, and small research teams, with defined deliverables (when trust is low) or general funding for a charitable purpose (when trust is high). Frontier-lab safety work is funded by the labs themselves out of revenue. So the principal-agent framing doesn’t really describe the funding landscape we have, and a philanthropic gate wouldn’t touch the actual capital flows we’d care about.
Compute verification (ZKPs of training, hardware-linked attestation, on-chip governance) is extremely promising, but mostly a lever for AI policy, aimed at government regulation of frontier development, not as a grant verification/compliance mechanism. Just in case you’re not familiar, I’d recommend looking at FlexHEG and related work on compute verification and AI assurance.