“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens
Description
Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I'm doing it again this year.
Cross-posted to my website.
Cause prioritization
In September, I published a report on the AI safety landscape, specifically focusing on AI x-risk policy/advocacy.
The prioritization section of the report explains why I focused on AI policy. It's similar to what I wrote about prioritization in my 2024 donations post, but more fleshed out. I won't go into detail on cause prioritization in this post because those two previous articles explain my thinking.
My high-level prioritization is mostly unchanged since last year. In short:
- Existential risk is a big deal.
- AI misalignment risk is the biggest existential risk.
- Within AI x-risk, policy/advocacy is much more neglected than technical research.
In the rest of this section, I will cover:
- What I want to achieve with my donations
- How I've changed my mind since last year
- How my confidence has increased since last year
What I want my donations to achieve
By donating, I want to increase the chances that we [...]
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Outline:
(00:22 ) Cause prioritization
(01:25 ) What I want my donations to achieve
(04:32 ) There is no good plan
(05:23 ) AI pause advocacy is the least-bad plan
(06:22 ) How Ive changed my mind since last year
(06:27 ) Im more concerned about non-alignment problems
(07:02 ) Im more concerned about AI-for-animals
(08:38 ) How my confidence has increased since last year
(08:43 ) We should pause frontier AI development
(09:03 ) Peaceful protests probably help
(10:22 ) I have a high bar for who to trust
(11:35 ) My favorite interventions
(13:04 ) Organizations (tax-deductible)
(13:50 ) AI-for-animals orgs
(15:18 ) AI Safety and Governance Fund
(15:54 ) Existential Risk Observatory
(17:02 ) Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
(18:58 ) Palisade Research
(19:41 ) PauseAI US
(21:25 ) Video projects
(21:50 ) Non-tax-deductible donation opportunities
(22:28 ) AI Policy Network
(23:21 ) Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI)
(24:18 ) ControlAI
(25:17 ) Congressional campaigns
(26:17 ) Encode
(26:54 ) Where Im donating
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
November 22nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AGcny8oBxBDCjqxdr/where-i-am-donating-in-2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.



