Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

https://www.cmu.edu/

mature8000 peopleFounded 1900

Endorsed by:

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Donate:Direct

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university founded in 1900, consistently ranked #1 in AI by U.S. News. CMU's AI safety and governance work spans its School of Computer Science, Software Engineering Institute, K&L Gates Ethics Initiative, Block Center for Technology and Society, and the student-led Carnegie Mellon AI Safety Initiative (CASI). Key faculty including Zico Kolter (who heads the ML Department and leads OpenAI's external safety review panel) work on adversarial robustness, AI unlearning, and AI evaluation. CMU also operates the federally funded Software Engineering Institute, which established the first AI Security Incident Response Team (AISIRT) for the Department of Defense.

Funding Details

Annual Budget: $1,800,000,000
Monthly Burn Rate: $150,000,000
Current Runway: -
Funding Goal: -
Funding Raised to Date: -
Fiscal Sponsor: -

Theory of Change

CMU advances AI safety through a multi-pronged institutional strategy: producing technical research on robustness, alignment, and evaluation methods that inform the field broadly; training the next generation of AI safety researchers through degree programs, fellowships, and CASI's educational pipeline; influencing AI policy and governance frameworks by embedding researchers in federal advisory roles (NIST, DoD, AISIC, OpenAI safety panels); and applying safety research to high-consequence national security domains through the SEI. The underlying theory is that a research university with top-ranked AI programs can simultaneously advance technical safety methods, shape industry and government norms, and seed the broader AI safety talent pipeline at scale.