DiscoverEA Forum Podcast (All audio)“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens
“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens

“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens

Update: 2025-11-23
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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.

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“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens

“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens