People
Updated 05/18/26Co-founder & CEO
President
Head of Growth and Strategy
Co-Working Space Manager
Head of People | People, Talent, & Operations
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
- $8,602,996
- Current Runway
- -
- Funding Goal
- -
- Funding Raised to Date
- $23,254,628
Org Details
Updated 05/18/26FAR.AI (originally the Fund for Alignment Research, now Frontier Alignment Research) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization founded in July 2022 and incorporated in October 2022. The organization was co-founded by Adam Gleave (CEO), who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from UC Berkeley under Stuart Russell and previously worked at Google DeepMind, and Karl Berzins (President/COO). FAR.AI's core mission is ensuring advanced AI systems are safe and beneficial for everyone. The organization focuses on research agendas that are too large to be pursued by individual academic or independent researchers but are too early-stage to be of interest to most for-profit organizations. They take bets on a range of promising early-stage agendas and scale up those that prove most successful. The organization's technical research is organized around three primary areas. Their robustness research has uncovered vulnerabilities in superhuman Go AI systems, work that was published in Nature and covered by the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Their value alignment work has developed more sample-efficient value learning algorithms. Their model evaluation direction has produced a variety of new black-box and white-box evaluation methods, including red-teaming leading language models. Beyond in-house research, FAR.AI engages in significant field-building activities. The Alignment Workshop series, inaugurated in February 2023, brings together top machine learning researchers from industry, academia, and government to discuss critical AI alignment topics. FAR.Labs, founded in Q3 2023, is a Berkeley-based coworking space hosting 40+ members from various AI safety organizations. The organization also runs a grantmaking program funded by a $12 million grant from Open Philanthropy to support research at academic institutions. FAR.AI has published over 30 research papers, hosted 10+ events reaching over 1,000 attendees, and had its research cited in U.S. Congressional testimony and covered by The New York Times, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times, and Ars Technica. The organization has been recommended by Founders Pledge as a high-impact giving opportunity. In 2025, FAR.AI secured over $30 million in funding commitments from Coefficient Giving (previously Open Philanthropy), Schmidt Sciences, Survival and Flourishing Fund, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), and the AI Safety Fund (AISF). This funding is enabling the organization to grow from 15 to 30+ researchers, launch a technical governance division collaborating with AI Safety Institutes and policymakers, and establish fellowship programs supporting 20+ fellows annually. Prior to incorporation, FAR.AI operated as a fiscally sponsored project under Players Philanthropy Fund.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26FAR.AI believes that AI safety is a global public good that receives substantially less investment than capability development. Their theory of change operates on multiple levels: (1) Conducting in-house technical research on robustness, alignment, and evaluation to identify vulnerabilities and develop safety techniques that could prove as transformative as RLHF was for the field, (2) Incubating early-stage research agendas that are too large for individual researchers but too early for industry, then scaling the most promising ones, (3) Building the AI safety field through workshops, fellowships, and a coworking space to grow the pipeline of safety researchers, (4) Bridging technical insights to policy through a technical governance division working with AI Safety Institutes and policymakers, and (5) Grantmaking to accelerate safety research at academic institutions. By combining direct research impact with field-building and policy influence, they aim to achieve major technical breakthroughs and influence safety standard adoption at frontier labs by 2028.
Grants Received
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26The FAR.AI YouTube channel (@FARAIResearch) publishes recordings of AI safety talks, seminars, and workshop sessions organized by FAR.AI, the AI safety research nonprofit based in Berkeley.
A fiscally sponsored AI safety project led by Ethan Perez that funded research engineers to work on language model misalignment, which later evolved into part of FAR.AI (Frontier Alignment Research).
Discussion
Key risk: Given their rapid expansion and broad portfolio, the main concern is diluted focus and low marginal counterfactual impact—many eval/robustness agendas are now pursued inside frontier labs and AI Safety Institutes—especially in light of >$30M recent commitments that may saturate their best growth opportunities.
Case for funding: FAR.AI combines hits-based, large-team early-stage safety research with demonstrated technical credibility (e.g., Nature-published exploits in superhuman Go systems and red-teaming of leading LLMs) and unique convening/translation capacity (Alignment Workshops, FAR.Labs, and a new technical governance division) to turn promising alignment and evaluation ideas into standards adopted by frontier labs and policymakers.