EleutherAI (the EleutherAI Institute) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization founded in 2020 that advances open-source AI research with a particular focus on mechanistic interpretability and alignment of large language models. Originally a volunteer Discord community aiming to replicate GPT-3, EleutherAI incorporated formally as a nonprofit in 2023 and now employs roughly 15 full- and part-time researchers. The organization trains and releases open-weight models, builds evaluation infrastructure (notably the widely used lm-evaluation-harness), and conducts interpretability research to understand how neural networks learn and generalize. Its mission is to ensure that studying powerful AI systems is not restricted to large corporations.
Funding Details
- Annual Budget
- $2,574,843
- Monthly Burn Rate
- $214,570
- Current Runway
- -
- Funding Goal
- -
- Funding Raised to Date
- -
- Fiscal Sponsor
- -
Theory of Change
EleutherAI believes that meaningful AI safety research requires open, independent access to frontier-class models and their internals — access that currently exists primarily inside a handful of large corporations. By training and releasing open-weight models, developing interpretability tools (such as the Pythia suite and lm-evaluation-harness), and publishing findings openly, EleutherAI aims to expand the pool of researchers who can study how AI systems work and fail. Their theory is that broad, transparent interpretability and alignment research — conducted outside corporate incentive structures — reduces the risk of deploying systems whose internal reasoning is opaque or misaligned. Democratizing model access also helps policymakers, auditors, and academics evaluate AI risks independently, contributing to better AI governance.
Grants Received
from Open Philanthropy
Projects
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 20, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC