Beneficial AI Foundation (BAIF)
The Beneficial AI Foundation (BAIF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in December 2022 with the mission of researching how to keep AI beneficial for generations to come. The organization pursues three main strategies: in-house technical research (with a focus on mechanistic interpretability and formal verification), the Buterin Fellowship program supporting PhD and postdoctoral researchers in AI existential safety, and the Quantitative AI Safety Initiative (QAISI), a multi-university collaboration with researchers from Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Montreal. BAIF is funded by donations from Vitalik Buterin and Erik Otto and is led by MIT professor Max Tegmark alongside co-founder Meia Chita-Tegmark.
Funding Details
- Annual Budget
- $670,550
- Monthly Burn Rate
- $55,879
- Current Runway
- -
- Funding Goal
- -
- Funding Raised to Date
- -
- Fiscal Sponsor
- -
Theory of Change
BAIF believes that advanced AI poses existential risks, and that current safety approaches are insufficient because they lack quantitative rigor. Just as engineers quantified failure rates for jet engines and nuclear reactors to make those technologies safe, BAIF aims to develop measurable safety standards and formal guarantees for AI. By funding mechanistic interpretability research (to understand what AI systems are actually doing), formal verification work (to mathematically certify that AI-written code does what it is supposed to do), and red-teaming and audit standards (to systematically identify vulnerabilities before deployment), BAIF seeks to give policymakers and developers the tools to verify that AI systems won't cause catastrophic harm. The Buterin Fellowship grows the pipeline of researchers working on these technical problems, while QAISI coordinates leading academics toward shared quantitative standards.
Grants Received
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Projects
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC