Word through the grapevine, for those who haven’t heard: apparently a few months back OpenPhil pulled funding for all AI safety lobbying orgs with any political right-wing ties. They didn’t just stop funding explicitly right-wing orgs, they stopped funding explicitly bipartisan orgs.
Of those, I think FAI is the only one at risk of OP being unable to fund them, based on my guess of where things are leaning. I would be quite surprised if they defunded the other ones on bipartisan grounds.
Possibly you meant to say something more narrow like “even if you are trying to be bipartisan, if you lean right, then OP is substantially less likely to fund you” which I do think is likely true, though my guess is you meant the stronger statement, which I think is false.
Curious whether this is a different source than me. My current best model was described in this comment, which is a bit different (and indeed, my sense was that if you are bipartisan, you might be fine, or might not, depending on whether you seem more connected to the political right, and whether people might associate you with the right):
Yep, my model is that OP does fund things that are explicitly bipartisan (like, they are not currently filtering on being actively affiliated with the left). My sense is in-practice it’s a fine balance and if there was some high-profile thing where Horizon became more associated with the right (like maybe some alumni becomes prominent in the republican party and very publicly credits Horizon for that, or there is some scandal involving someone on the right who is a Horizon alumni), then I do think their OP funding would have a decent chance of being jeopardized, and the same is not true on the left.
Another part of my model is that one of the key things about Horizon is that they are of a similar school of PR as OP themselves. They don’t make public statements. They try to look very professional. They are probably very happy to compromise on messaging and public comms with Open Phil and be responsive to almost any request that OP would have messaging wise. That makes up for a lot. I think if you had a more communicative and outspoken organization with a similar mission to Horizon, I think the funding situation would be a bunch dicier (though my guess is if they were competent, an organization like that could still get funding).
More broadly, I am not saying “OP staff want to only support organizations on the left”. My sense is that many individual OP staff would love to fund more organizations on the right, and would hate for polarization to occur, but that organizationally and because of constraints by Dustin, they can’t, and so you will see them fund organizations that aim for more engagement with the right, but there will be relatively hard lines and constraints that will mostly prevent that.
If it is true that OP has withdrawn funding from explicitly bipartisan orgs, even if not commonly associated with the right, then that would be an additional update for me, so am curious whether this is mostly downstream of my interpretations or whether you have additional sources.
I am posting this now mostly because I’ve heard it from multiple sources. I don’t know to what extent those sources are themselves correlated (i.e. whether or not the rumor started from one person).
However, at present, it remains the case that most of the individuals in the current field of AI governance and policy (whether we fund them or not) are personally left-of-center and have more left-of-center policy networks. Therefore, we think AI policy work that engages conservative audiences is especially urgent and neglected, and we regularly recommend right-of-center funding opportunities in this category to several funders.
I think the comment more confirms than disconfirms John’s comment (though I still think it’s too broad for other reasons). OP “funding” something historically has basically always meant recommending a grant to GV. Luke’s language to me suggests that indeed the right of center grants are no longer referred to GV (based on a vague vibe of how he refers to funders in plural).
OP has always made some grant recommendations to other funders (historically OP would probably describe those grants as “rejected but referred to an external funder”). As Luke says, those are usually ignored, and OP’s counterfactual effect on those grants is much less, and IMO it would be inaccurate to describe those recommendations as “OP funding something”. As I said in the comment I quote in the thread, most OP staff would like to fund things right of center, but GV does not seem to want to, as such the only choice OP has is to refer them to other funders (which sometimes works, but mostly doesn’t).
As another piece of evidence, when OP defunded all the orgs that GV didn’t want to fund anymore, the communication emails that OP sent said that “Open Philanthropy is exiting funding area X” or “exiting organization X”. By the same use of language, yes, it seems like OP has exited funding right-of-center policy work.
(I think it would make sense to taboo “OP funding X” in future conversations to avoid confusion, but also, I think historically it was very meaningfully the case that getting funded by GV is much better described as “getting funded by OP” given that you would never talk to anyone at GV and the opinions of anyone at GV would basically have no influence on you getting funded. Things are different now, and in a meaningful sense OP isn’t funding anyone anymore, they are just recommending grants to others, and it matters more what those others think then what OP staff thinks)
Epistemic status: rumor.
Word through the grapevine, for those who haven’t heard: apparently a few months back OpenPhil pulled funding for all AI safety lobbying orgs with any political right-wing ties. They didn’t just stop funding explicitly right-wing orgs, they stopped funding explicitly bipartisan orgs.
My best guess this is false. As a quick sanity-check, here are some bipartisan and right-leaning organizations historically funded by OP:
FAI leans right. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/foundation-for-american-innovation-ai-safety-policy-advocacy/
Horizon is bipartisan https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/open-philanthropy-technology-policy-fellowship-2022/ .
CSET is bipartisan https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/georgetown-university-center-for-security-and-emerging-technology/ .
IAPS is bipartisan. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/page/2/?focus-area=potential-risks-advanced-ai&view-list=false, https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/institute-for-ai-policy-strategy-general-support/
RAND is bipartisan. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/rand-corporation-emerging-technology-fellowships-and-research-2024/.
Safe AI Forum. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/safe-ai-forum-operating-expenses/
AI Safety Communications Centre. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/effective-ventures-foundation-ai-safety-communications-centre/ seems to lean left.
Of those, I think FAI is the only one at risk of OP being unable to fund them, based on my guess of where things are leaning. I would be quite surprised if they defunded the other ones on bipartisan grounds.
Possibly you meant to say something more narrow like “even if you are trying to be bipartisan, if you lean right, then OP is substantially less likely to fund you” which I do think is likely true, though my guess is you meant the stronger statement, which I think is false.
Also worth noting Dustin Moskowitz was a prominent enough donor this election cycle, for Harris, to get highlighted in news coverage of her donors: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3179215/kamala-harris-influential-megadonors/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/us/politics/harris-billion-dollar-fundraising.html
Curious whether this is a different source than me. My current best model was described in this comment, which is a bit different (and indeed, my sense was that if you are bipartisan, you might be fine, or might not, depending on whether you seem more connected to the political right, and whether people might associate you with the right):
If it is true that OP has withdrawn funding from explicitly bipartisan orgs, even if not commonly associated with the right, then that would be an additional update for me, so am curious whether this is mostly downstream of my interpretations or whether you have additional sources.
I am posting this now mostly because I’ve heard it from multiple sources. I don’t know to what extent those sources are themselves correlated (i.e. whether or not the rumor started from one person).
A related comment from lukeprog (who works at OP) was posted on the EA Forum. It includes:
I think the comment more confirms than disconfirms John’s comment (though I still think it’s too broad for other reasons). OP “funding” something historically has basically always meant recommending a grant to GV. Luke’s language to me suggests that indeed the right of center grants are no longer referred to GV (based on a vague vibe of how he refers to funders in plural).
OP has always made some grant recommendations to other funders (historically OP would probably describe those grants as “rejected but referred to an external funder”). As Luke says, those are usually ignored, and OP’s counterfactual effect on those grants is much less, and IMO it would be inaccurate to describe those recommendations as “OP funding something”. As I said in the comment I quote in the thread, most OP staff would like to fund things right of center, but GV does not seem to want to, as such the only choice OP has is to refer them to other funders (which sometimes works, but mostly doesn’t).
As another piece of evidence, when OP defunded all the orgs that GV didn’t want to fund anymore, the communication emails that OP sent said that “Open Philanthropy is exiting funding area X” or “exiting organization X”. By the same use of language, yes, it seems like OP has exited funding right-of-center policy work.
(I think it would make sense to taboo “OP funding X” in future conversations to avoid confusion, but also, I think historically it was very meaningfully the case that getting funded by GV is much better described as “getting funded by OP” given that you would never talk to anyone at GV and the opinions of anyone at GV would basically have no influence on you getting funded. Things are different now, and in a meaningful sense OP isn’t funding anyone anymore, they are just recommending grants to others, and it matters more what those others think then what OP staff thinks)
Is this development unexpected enough to worth remarking upon? This is just Conquest’s Second Law.