Welcome to the November edition of our newsletter! 

As Open Phil has grown, we've had more news to share — so we're switching to monthly rather than quarterly updates going forward.

This month's highlight: CEO Alexander Berger and President Emily Oehlsen wrote a pair of blog posts outlining why we fund work to both harness AI's benefits and mitigate its risks, while Alexander and Director of Partnerships Liz Givens wrote about why AI safety and security need more philanthropic funding.

We are continuing to grow our team — see here or the end of the newsletter for open roles and opportunities to get involved. And keep reading for more updates and highlights!

Best,
Jeremy Klemin 
Editor

In addition to publishing a blog series about our approach to funding work on AI, we: 

• Launched a blog as part of our Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness work. The first post proposes four key “pillars” for defense against biological threats.

• Wrote about the Institute for Replication’s efforts to make social science research more robust and reliable.

• Commissioned a case study on the evolution and impact of farm animal welfare corporate campaigns, and wrote about the findings. 

• The San Francisco Business Times profiled Cari Tuna, Open Philanthropy’s chair, in a story about her data-driven approach to philanthropy. 

• The San Francisco Standard featured Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, Open Philanthropy’s main funders, in a story on the American philanthropic landscape.

• Inside Philanthropy reported on the launch of our Abundance and Growth Fund. 

• Bloomberg highlighted the work of Eurogroup for Animals and Compassion in World Farming in an article about the perils of selective chicken breeding. 

• The Pew Research Center released a study on the low incidence of fires in multifamily housing, employing research from The Center for Building in North America.

• TIME highlighted the work of Metaculus and RAND in an article about AI forecasting.

• The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian covered research we supported, which found that cash transfers were highly impactful in Kenya when the money was given to pregnant women living near hospitals. 

• The Australian Financial Review reported on the work of YIMBY Melbourne and our support for them.

• The Argument, a new magazine focused on abundance, progress, economic growth, and related issues, went live in August. (We are an investor.)

• Cari Tuna, Open Philanthropy’s chair, spoke about her start in philanthropy and the importance of mentorship at the 2025 Forbes Impact Summit.

• Lewis Bollard, program director in Farm Animal Welfare, gave a TED Talk on how to end factory farming and appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast to discuss the economics of the meat industry — read Lewis’s follow-up post to the podcast here. After the podcast, Lewis and Dwarkesh announced a donation match that raised $2.4 million on behalf of farm animal advocacy.

• Matt Clancy, senior program officer in Abundance and Growth, discussed productivity, cities, and the future of work on the City Talks podcast. He was also quoted in an article about AI’s impact on scientific research. 

• Andrew Snyder-Beattie, program director in Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness, discussed low-tech defenses against future pandemics on the 80,000 Hours Podcast.

• Tom Hird, senior program associate in Global Public Health Policy, joined a Devex panel at the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly to discuss our work on preventing lead poisoning. 

• Jacob Trefethen, program director in Global Health and Wellbeing, released a five-part miniseries about proteins on his podcast, Hard Drugs. The finale is a 4.5-hour deep dive on AI's potential to accelerate medical progress.

• Matt Clancy, senior program officer in Abundance and Growth, co-published a paper in Science on the extent to which lower historical funding for the National Institutes of Health would have reduced access to medicine.

• Deena Mousa, lead researcher in GHW Cause Prioritization, wrote for Works in Progress about why AI systems haven’t yet replaced radiologists and for The Times on why the U.K. needs more air conditioning. 

• Jacob Trefethen, program director in Global Health and Wellbeing, wrote paired essays on the promise and limitations of AI for medical research.

• Oliver Kim, research fellow in GHW Cause Prioritization, wrote about the difficulty of estimating ancient-world GDP for Asterisk. 

• Julian Hazell, program associate in Navigating Transformative AI, wrote about AI safety talent development programs and other AI safety projects that he wishes more people worked on.

• CA YIMBY played a key role in getting SB 79 passed in California. The bill makes it legal to build multifamily housing near high-frequency transit, which could enable over a million new units.

• The Open Wing Alliance reported that 92% of cage-free egg commitments with 2024 deadlines have now been fulfilled.

• Metaculus just shared an update on a public benchmarking tournament it launched last year to evaluate how large language models fare on real-world questions compared to expert human forecasters.

• L214, a French farm animal welfare organization, secured a welfare commitment that will likely cover over 200 million chickens each year.

• The Epic Air Quality Fund played a meaningful role in getting new legislation on air quality monitoring and enforcement standards passed in Ghana.

We’re hiring for: 

• Multiple roles on our Technical AI Safety team at a range of seniority levels (deadline November 24).

• Recruiters to help Open Philanthropy grow, focusing on either round management or pipeline development (deadline November 23).

• Senior generalist roles across our Global Catastrophic Risks portfolio to help increase impact and overall capacity (deadline November 20).

• Operations roles based in either SF or D.C. (rolling deadline).

As always, please consider referring candidates to these roles — if we hire someone you referred, we’ll give you $5,000.

We also have: 

• A variety of funding opportunities, including fellowships, scholarships, support for group organizers, and funding for career development and transition.

• A general application to let us know you'd be interested in working at Open Philanthropy.