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Open Philanthropy
American grantmaking foundation From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Open Philanthropy is an American philanthropic advising and funding organization focused on cost-effective, high-impact giving. Its current CEO is Alexander Berger.
As of June 2025, Open Philanthropy has directed more than $4 billion[1] in grants across a variety of focus areas, including global health, scientific research, pandemic preparedness, potential risks from advanced AI, and farm animal welfare. It chooses focus areas through a process of "strategic cause selection" — looking for problems that are large, tractable, and neglected relative to their size.[2]
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History
While Open Philanthropy works with a range of donors, its founding and most significant ongoing partnership is with Good Ventures, the foundation of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook and later Asana, becoming a billionaire in the process. He and Tuna, his wife, were inspired by Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save,[3] and became the youngest couple to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, promising to give away most of their money. Tuna left her journalist position at The Wall Street Journal to focus on philanthropy full-time, and the couple started the Good Ventures foundation in 2011. The organization partnered with GiveWell, a charity evaluator founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld. The partnership named itself the "Open Philanthropy Project" in 2014, and began operating independently in 2017.
More recently, Open Philanthropy has launched collaborative funds in partnership with philanthropic donors, including the Lead Exposure Action Fund and the Abundance and Growth Fund.
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Grantmaking
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Open Philanthropy makes grants across a variety of focus areas where it believes that "philanthropic capital can have outsized leverage."[4]
In 2023, Open Philanthropy directed over $750 million in grants through recommendations to Good Ventures and other philanthropic partners.[5]
Cause selection
Open Philanthropy selects causes to work on using three criteria:[6]
- Importance: How many individuals are affected by the problem, and how deeply.
- Neglectedness: Whether the cause receives adequate attention and resources from others, especially other major philanthropists.
- Tractability: The likelihood that a philanthropic funder can contribute to significant progress.
If a cause looks promising according to those criteria, Open Philanthropy researchers review literature and meet with experts to get a better understanding of the area, and then conduct an investigation to determine whether there are enough strong giving opportunities to justify the opening of a new program.[7]
Across the portfolio as a whole, Open Philanthropy aims to equalize marginal returns across different interventions to maximize overall impact.[8]
Impact estimation
Open Philanthropy often uses a quantitative approach to estimate a grant's expected impact — for example, using back-of-the-envelope calculations based on scientific evidence to evaluate projects in areas like vaccine research, farm animal welfare, and the development of techniques for detecting environmental lead.[9]
Hits-based giving
In some cases, Open Philanthropy pursues "high-risk, high-reward" opportunities that don't necessarily have a strong evidence base or a high chance of success, but could potentially become philanthropic "hits" with enormous positive impact. It refers to this approach as "hits-based giving," comparing it to strategies used in venture capital investing.[10]
Examples of philanthropic hits cited by Open Philanthropy include the Green Revolution and the development of oral contraceptives. The organization has itself invested heavily in basic science and other areas with highly uncertain impact — for example, as an early supporter[11] of Nobel Laureate David Baker's work on computational methods for protein design.[12]
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Focus areas
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Open Philanthropy's focus areas are split across two portfolios: Global Health and Wellbeing, and Global Catastrophic Risks.
Global Health and Wellbeing
Open Philanthropy's Global Health & Wellbeing portfolio focuses on improving health outcomes and overall wellbeing, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The approach emphasizes cost-effective, evidence-based interventions that can be scaled to reach large populations.
Historically, a large fraction of funding in this portfolio went toward charities recommended by GiveWell. Since 2021, Open Philanthropy has pushed to identify causes that could leverage funding to "get more humanitarian impact per dollar", leading to the creation of several new programs (in areas such as public health and development policy) and leaving GiveWell as a smaller portion of the portfolio.[13]
Global health and development
Open Philanthropy's support for global health and development includes efforts to prevent malaria, promote routine vaccinations, and scale up water chlorination efforts to reduce the spread of waterborne diseases.
Notable grantees include the Malaria Consortium,[14] New Incentives,[15] and Evidence Action.[16]
Farm animal welfare
Open Philanthropy's support for farm animal welfare includes efforts to reform cruel practices on factory farms, develop technologies to reduce animal pain and suffering, and support the development and adoption of alternative proteins in hopes of reducing meat consumption.
Open Philanthropy has been called "the world's biggest funder of farm animal welfare".[17]
Notable grantees include The Humane League,[18] Mercy for Animals,[19] and the Good Food Institute.[20]
Scientific research
Projects funded by Open Philanthropy's Scientific Research program include efforts to create new vaccines and antivirals, develop new scientific tools and techniques, and fund fellowship programs and conference travel for young scientists.
Notable grantees include David Baker,[21] Sherlock Biosciences,[22] and the International Vaccine Institute.[23]
The Scientific Research team works closely with the Global Health R&D team, which is more focused on "supporting tools and treatments through the development life cycle".[24]
Effective giving and careers
Open Philanthropy's Effective Giving and Careers program aims to "empower people to use their careers and donations to help others as much as possible". It supports organizations that encourage impact-focused career choices and charitable donations.
Notable grantees include 80,000 Hours,[25] Founders Pledge,[26] and Giving What We Can.[27]
Global public health policy
Open Philanthropy's support for global public health policy includes work to mitigate lead exposure, reduce air pollution in India and other South Asian countries, and prevent suicide by encouraging the selective restriction of access to toxic pesticides.
Notable grantees include the Lead Exposure Elimination Project,[28] IIT Kanpur,[29] and the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention.
Global aid policy
Open Philanthropy's Global Aid Policy program supports efforts to increase aid spending and improve the cost-effectiveness of existing aid programs.
Notable grantees include the Joep Lange Institute,[30] the Center for Global Development,[31] and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.[32]
Global Catastrophic Risks
This portfolio is dedicated to addressing global catastrophic risks — threats that have the potential to "kill enough people to threaten civilization as we know it".[33]
Across the portfolio as a whole, much of Open Philanthropy's grantmaking is focused on research, policy advocacy, and capacity-building efforts (e.g. helping people find jobs where they can work full-time on global catastrophic risk mitigation, or building up related academic fields).
Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness
Open Philanthropy's work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness includes support for disease surveillance, restrictions on gain-of-function research, and the development of next-generation personal protective equipment.
Notable grantees include the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense,[34] the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,[35] and the World Health Organization.[36]
Open Philanthropy's Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team helped to convene a group of scientists to discuss potential risks from the creation of mirror bacteria.[37] This work was eventually published in Science.[38]
Some have claimed that by "flooding" money into biosecurity, Open Philanthropy is "absorbing much of the field's experienced research capacity, focusing the attention of experts on this narrow, extremely unlikely, aspect of biosecurity risk".[39]
Forecasting
Open Philanthropy's Forecasting program works to enable the creation of "high-quality forecasts on questions relevant to high-stakes decisions".[40]
Notable grantees include Philip Tetlock[41] and Metaculus.[42]
Global catastrophic risks capacity building
This program aims to "grow and empower the community of people focused on addressing threats to humanity and protecting the future of human civilization".
Notable grantees include the Centre for Effective Altruism,[43] Kurzgesagt,[44] and several academics funded to develop courses on relevant topics.[45]
Potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence
Open Philanthropy is a leading funder of research on AI alignment and other work aimed at reducing existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. The organization has stated a belief that artificial general intelligence may be developed before 2045,[46] and that this could pose risks from accidents, deliberate misuse, or "drastic societal change". Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at Open Philanthropy, has said that "a lens that [she uses] to think about the A.I. revolution is that it will play out like the Industrial Revolution but around 10 times faster."[47]
Notable grantees include the Center for Security and Emerging Technology,[48] the Alignment Research Center,[49] and Mila.[50]
Past focus areas
Past focus areas of Open Philanthropy have included:
- Criminal justice reform (which spun out as a new organization in 2021)
- U.S. macroeconomic stabilization policy (which ceased to be a focus in 2021, though European macroeconomic policy grants have been made more recently)
- Immigration policy (which ceased to be a focus in 2022).
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Collaborative funds
Lead Exposure Action Fund
In 2024, the organization launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund in collaboration with partners including Good Ventures and the Gates Foundation.[51] The fund has committed $100 million toward reducing lead exposure, approximately doubling the amount of global philanthropic spending on lead reduction.
Open Philanthropy is also a founding member of the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future, a public-private partnership aimed at ending childhood lead poisoning. Other founding members include UNICEF and USAID.[52]
Abundance and Growth Fund
In 2025, the organization launched the Abundance and Growth Fund in partnership with Good Ventures, Patrick Collison, and other donors. The fund will dedicate $120 million over three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress, building on Open Philanthropy's previous work in housing and innovation policy.[53]
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References
External links
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