[Linkpost] “How to Actually Spend Billions on AI Safety” by Sophie Kim

This is a link post. Cross-posted from The Counterfactual by the Forum Team. Subtitle: A concrete strategy for deploying the largest wave of philanthropic capital in history The OpenAI Foundation holds $180 billion in equity. Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. When the time comes to spend all this money, what should we actually do with it? Here's my best guess. The problem: scaling what we have is not enough When most people think about how to solve AI safety, they think about what we’re already doing, and how to scale it up. Concretely, this looks like: scaling fellowships like MATS, Pivotal, and ERA; investing more money into AI safety research organizations like Redwood, METR, and MIRI; and perhaps, more recently, expanding programs like the Generator Residency. This is important work, but it is not sufficient to win. The Maven system that killed 120 children in Minab wasn’t misaligned. Claude didn’t go rogue. The system did exactly what it was designed to do. The failure was that no government framework existed to regulate how AI gets integrated into military kill chains, how fast targeting decisions can be compressed, or what human oversight is required before a [...] --- Outline: (03:01) 1. Billions into mass media and movement building (07:37) 2. Billions into political infrastructure (09:42) 3. Build the capacity to deploy the rest (10:01) a. Solve the grantmaker bottleneck (11:38) b. Poach top technical talent (12:31) c. Address the generalist bottleneck (13:11) d. Fix fellowship pipelines (13:46) Conclusion --- First published: May 13th, 2026 Source: Linkpost URL: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.