Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is an independent 501(c)(3) public charity whose mission is to improve human civilization's long-term prospects for survival and flourishing. BERI's primary work is collaborating with university research groups focused on mitigating existential risk, providing them with flexible services and support that bypass slow university administration channels. Typical services include hiring research assistants and engineers, purchasing software and equipment, coordinating travel and events, and providing general administrative support. BERI currently works with research groups at UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, and UMass Amherst, and also serves as a fiscal sponsor for several independent projects.
Funding Details
- Annual Budget
- $6,952,488
- Monthly Burn Rate
- $579,374
- Current Runway
- -
- Funding Goal
- -
- Funding Raised to Date
- $17,000,000
- Fiscal Sponsor
- -
Theory of Change
BERI believes that university-based research groups working on existential risk are significantly bottlenecked by administrative and operational constraints inherent to university systems. By providing these groups with flexible, hands-on operational support — hiring staff, managing procurement, coordinating travel and events, and handling logistics that would otherwise be slow or impossible through university channels — BERI removes friction and accelerates research output. Their theory is that strengthening the operational capacity of the most important x-risk research groups, and solving problems common across multiple organizations, leads to faster and more effective progress on reducing existential threats to humanity.
Grants Received
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
from Open Philanthropy
Projects
A collaboration between the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) and the Autonomous Learning Laboratory (ALL) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focused on safe and fair machine learning research.
An operational collaboration in which the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) provides administrative, technical, and staffing support to the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley, enabling CHAI researchers to focus on AI safety work.
A collaboration between the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) and UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) focused on developing AI risk management standards and guidance for developers of increasingly general-purpose AI systems.
People
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 18, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC