Beneficial AI Foundation (BAIF)

The Beneficial AI Foundation (BAIF) is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in December 2022 by Max Tegmark, an MIT professor of physics and AI, and Meia Chita-Tegmark. The organization operates under the tagline "No one knows how to make tomorrow's AI safe. Let's change that," reflecting its conviction that current AI safety approaches lack the rigorous quantitative grounding needed to handle transformative AI systems. BAIF pursues three main programs. First, in-house research focuses on mechanistic interpretability (understanding how AI systems work internally, sometimes called "artificial neuroscience") and formal verification approaches to guaranteed safe AI. Staff researchers are working on deploying AI-written formally verified code rather than untrusted neural networks, with the goal of providing hard safety guarantees. Second, the Buterin Fellowship program provides PhD stipends ($40,000/year plus tuition) and postdoctoral stipends ($80,000/year) to researchers working on AI existential safety at universities in the US, UK, and Canada. This fellowship is administered in partnership with the Future of Life Institute. Third, the Quantitative AI Safety Initiative (QAISI) is a collaborative research effort co-led by prominent researchers including Yoshua Bengio (Montreal), Stuart Russell and Dawn Song (Berkeley), Clark Barrett (Stanford), and Bryan Parno (Carnegie Mellon). QAISI aims to develop quantitative safety standards for AI analogous to the failure-rate standards used in aerospace and nuclear engineering. The organization is funded by Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum co-founder) and Erik Otto. Its registered address is in Wilmington, Delaware, and its operations are centered around Cambridge, Massachusetts (the MIT area), though researchers are distributed internationally. As of the FY2024 990 filing, BAIF reported revenues of $125,000 and expenses of $670,550, with grants made to UC Berkeley ($210,238) and the Good Ventures Foundation ($150,027). The team includes approximately 14 people per LinkedIn, though the 990 reports no full-time employees (suggesting most are contractors or part-time). Max Tegmark serves as President and Treasurer; Meia Chita-Tegmark serves as Secretary.