An incubator & community space in SF; for doers of good and masters of craft
An incubator & community space in SF; for doers of good and masters of craft
People
Updated 06/10/26By grantmaking.aicreator
Funding Details
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Project Details
Updated 06/10/26By grantmaking.aiMox is San Francisco's primary AI safety incubator and Effective Altruism community space. Over the last year, we’ve supported high-impact work by hosting fellowships, events, offices and coworking. We’re now looking for individual donors and institutional funding to carry us through the next year!
We're aiming to raise $450k, and think we can effectively deploy up to $1.2m to run more great events, improve our space, and incubate new fellowships. To kick things off, one anonymous donor has offered Mox a 1:1 match up to $100k -- if we can raise $50k+.
Please support us through Manifund, or read on to learn more about our work!
Interested in donating a large amount? Reach out to Rachel Shu, Mox Director at rachel@moxsf.com**.
Our first year in review
Mox launched on Feb 15, 2025. In a single year on a shoestring budget, we've become a primary nexus for the AI safety community and other EA-adjacent work in San Francisco. We’ve hosted hundreds of members and thousands of visitors, organized our own public events and fellowship, and supported dozens of other impactful orgs.
By the numbers:
- 183 active members
- 15 private offices
- 377 events hosted
- Partnerships with 19 AI Safety & EA orgs
- 4 floor (40k sq ft) buildout
Fellowships & programs
We supported five residencies in the last year:
- FLF Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning: 30 fellows exploring, researching, and developing potential beneficial AI for Human Reasoning tools.
- PIBBSS Fellowship 2025 (now Principles of Intelligence): 17 fellows in residence for cross-disciplinary AI safety research.
- Seldon Lab Accelerator****, Batch 1: 4 startups building AI safety infrastructure, including Andon Labs, Workshop Labs, and Lucid Computing.
- Seldon Lab Accelerator, Batch 2: 6 startups, currently in residence.
- The Frame Fellowship: An 8-week program for 8 video creators communicating about AI safety, developed in-house at Mox.
We also offer our space for retreats, workshops, and hackathons, serving orgs like Tarbell, 1DaySooner, Elicit, Asimov Press, FutureSearch, and AVA International.
Finally, we work with local conferences, hosting pre/post conference coworking and side events for EAG Bay Area, LessOnline, Manifest, and The Curve.
How does Mox contribute to these programs’ success?
- Provides a fully furnished office
- Situates them alongside other groups doing similar work
- Provides event venue space directly connected to their workspace
- Handles daily catering, janitorial and supplies
- Troubleshoots participant tech
Public Events
We hosted 377 events over the last year, including:
- Senator Scott Wiener on AI safety legislation — live Q&A with CA Senator and author of SB-53.
- Sentient Futures Summit — a 350+ attendee, 3-day conference in February 2026 focused on AI and Animal Welfare, as featured in the SF Standard.
- Models in Moral Mazes — Anthropic research scholars previewed an unpublished paper on misalignment at Mox before public release.
- Man vs Machine Hackathon (METR × Factory.AI) — a 300 person, live RCT on AI coding agent productivity
- Q&As and fireside chats with Joe Carlsmith, Eli Lifland, Nate Soares, Scott Aaronson, Joel Becker and Bryan Caplan.
Mox also hosts recurring community events, such as:
- Effective Altruism SF, biweekly events and meetups
- Astral Codex Ten SF, monthly meetups
- 90/30 Club, machine learning paper reading group
- Mathematics with Lean, the interactive theorem prover
Mox has been an invaluable resource for us when running EA SF [Effective Altruism San Francisco], since its large and well-equipped facility allowed us to cater food, run speaker events, workshops, and otherwise host much larger and more ambitious events than we otherwise would have been able to.
— Lead organizers of EA SF
Individuals & Coworking
We currently have 183 active members; on a typical coworking day, 50-80 people are at Mox. A sampling of individual members who are frequently at Mox:
- Justin Kuiper, AI safety video producer
- Ross Rheingans-Yoo, philanthropic investor
- Itsi Weinstock, Senterra Funders
- Kamile Lukosuite, GovAI
- Joshua Levy, Holloway
- Ronak Mehta, AI safety researcher
You can see a list of all members here: https://moxsf.com/people
Testimonials from our August 2025 feedback survey:
It feels like a second home, but more lively. I can always expect to run into a friend who is down to cowork or hang.
— Constance Li, founder of Sentient Futures
I can walk up to anyone and have an interesting conversation; every single person I've met here has welcomed questions about their work and been curious about mine.
— Gavriel Kleinwaks, Horizon Fellow
Mox has the best density of people with the values & capabilities I care about the most. In general, it's more social & feels better organized for serendipity vs any coworking space I've been to before, comparable to perhaps like 0.3 Manifests per month.
— Venki Kumar
Private offices and partner organizations
In Year 1, Mox was home to 15 private offices, including:
- Sentient Futures: promoting animal welfare and sentience research
- Tampersec: building physical computing infrastructure security
- Andon Labs: building autonomous organizations such as Project Vend, via Seldon accelerator
- Pantograph: building a preschool for robots
- BlueDot Impact (pending visa): online courses for AI safety upskilling
We also maintain a Guest Program with 19 partner organizations, providing complimentary drop-in access for a variety of orgs we highly respect. Public program partners include: MIRI, FAR.AI, Redwood Research, Palisade, GovAI, Epoch, AI Impacts, Timaeus, Elicit, Evitable, FAI, and MATS.
Our teammates visit San Francisco a couple of times a month. Instead of renting a coworking spot, Mox gives us a familiar space with friendly faces that we reliably run into. It feels closer to going to the college library with friends than to an office. We hang out there for many hours after our work is done!
— Deger Turan, CEO of Metaculus
Past funding and budget updates
Grant updates
In our initial fundraising post a year ago, we proposed three budget tiers — minimal ($1.6M/year), mainline (~$2M), and ambitious ($3.6M).
What we spent annualized to roughly $1.2M, less than even our ‘minimal’ tier projection. What we delivered landed closer to ‘mainline’: 183 members, 144 Guest Program participants, 15 offices, a team of 5, and 2 tentpole events most months. And from the ‘ambitious’ tier, we succeeded at expanding Mox to all four floors of 1680 Mission.
Mox operates on a lean budget; we believe our per-member and total costs compare favorably to other AI safety hubs such as Constellation, Lighthaven, and LISA. We’ve done this by keeping our team small, finding good deals on rent and furnishings, and charging fair prices to our members and clients. We expect monthly revenue to continue growing by $10-15k/mo for the next 3-6 months, with offices and memberships both scaling steadily, and project steady state expenses to be ~$150k/month.
See our monthly revenue and expenses spreadsheet: May 2025 - Jan 2026
Budget basics
Grant funding (Craig Falls & EAIF): $300k
Grant funding (Manifund): $500k
Revenue to date: $600k
Projected revenue in 2026: $1.4m
- 35% — Memberships
- 35% — Offices
- 20% — Programs
- 10% — Events
Projected costs in 2026: $1.5m
- 40% — Labor
- 30% — Rent & utilities
- 25% — Office supplies
- 5% — Event costs
(all figures approximate)
Upcoming Plans
1. Grow and improve our main offerings
Events:
- More major conferences like Sentient Futures Summit
- More public talks with key speakers like Senator Weiner
- Improve our first floor and make it highly usable and more publicly accessible, building our ability to provide a good space, which mostly shows up in the impact we have, and somewhat in revenue.
Programs:
- Serve repeat cohorts of the fellowship programs that have used our space so far
- Additionally serve 3-7 new fellowships and workshops in this coming year
Coworking:
- Continue growing our community of individual members to 120-150 daily users, 300+ total members
- Maintain the ability to select private offices based on fit, rather than market rate
- Create additional meeting rooms and other communal areas in the coworking space
2. Attract international talent via Global Expert Fellowship
A key part of our second-year vision is the Global Expert Fellowship: hosting independent researchers, domain specialists, and builders through J-1 visa programs to create new frontier technology collaborations within the Mox community and internationally. Learn more here.
This may be the highest-impact thing we can achieve this year. It has immediate external impact by enabling independent researchers to quickly enter the US to do work, and it strengthens Mox by expanding our network of high-quality talent. Mox is in a rare position to pull this off, as we are able to meet State Department requirements for visa-qualifying cultural exchange which many other organizations cannot.
3. Incubate new workshops and programs
We have an advantage in creating our own programs, sourcing from the talent pool we're developing.
Upcoming example: the Muybridge Fellowship for Visual Interpretability, which would bring together technical visual and interactive pioneers to improve the presentation of mechanistic interpretability research and broaden its accessibility. This builds on the experience gained running the existing Frame Fellowship.
Support Mox
Thank you for reading this! We'd appreciate your support, whether via:
- A direct donation (through Manifund, or contact Rachel Shu at rachel@moxsf.com)
- Sharing this fundraiser with other potential donors
- Leaving a comment about your own experience of Mox
And of course, we're always on the lookout for excellent members, orgs, or events to work with us; please send them our way!
Grants Received
Updated 06/10/26By grantmaking.aiDiscussion
great gratitude for the good times, tasty food, and lovely people at Mox
Mox is so awesome, it's a great space and run very well.
Mox provides a lot of value to value-aligned projects in SF and is obviously worth funding.
Seldon Lab has run both our accelerator batches out of Mox, and it's been a great home base. The biggest thing it gave us was a real foothold in SF. Getting set up quickly in the city rather than defaulting to Berkeley mattered a lot. Rachel and Austin were super helpful making it happen on short notice, and have reliably supported on a range of different things since.
I'm not aware of anything else filling this gap for the EA/AIS community: Central location in SF, 24/7 access, and zero friction for hosting people, guests, and events.
I think it's impressive what they were able to accomplish on a very tight budget. The SF EA & AI safety community needs a well-resourced home, and Mox deserves a budget that matches the caliber of people it's already attracting.
@Finn-Metz thanks, it's been great having you, Esben, and other Seldon folks and batchmates at Mox. Glad we were able to fill this role for you!
Mox was a wonderful and nurturing home for us during our first ~6 months as a company! I think one of the most important things for an early startup is to have a lot of surface area exposing you to people who may be involved in some way down the line, and Mox provided a lot of that. The most memorable talk for me was a lunch with Scott Aaronson, but there was really a constant stream of interesting people coming by and wanting to talk to us about our robots. An earlier company of mine went through YC, and I think Mox is actually much better at this than YC was. I think it helps that Mox's community is much more tightly knit and mission-aligned.
If you are on the fence about donating, you should donate!
@AlexGajewski thanks! I loved the Cafe Calculate series you ran while at Mox, which likewise brought in a stream of interesting people. I expect your new office is treating you well, but we'll always be proud to have hosted Nonsense Factory Pantograph's earliest days!
Great space with great leadership
(COI: I currently live with Austin Chen and Rachel Shu.)
I had been planning to donate $20k-40k to Manifund or Mox out of personal donation budget; alas I think this might lead to too significant COI for my own future possible involvements with Manifund or Mox. Instead, I'm laying out a case for funding here!
Mostly my excitement about Mox routes through (1) great event experiences I've had at Mox and (2) the dumb obvious case for there to exist an AI safety hub in San Francisco.
On (1): I've spoken at a Golden Gate Institute event focused on my METR research, co-hosted a hackathon with/for METR, and co-hosted 2 very large music events.
I'm not sure what the counterfactual for the GGI was because I didn't organize it, but presumably GGI would have used some worse event space (in particular much smaller + with less relevant default crowd).
I think there's a ~50% chance the METR hackathon simply wouldn't have happened without Mox. (In the end I think the hackathon ended up not being so helpful, unfortunately, although this is very clearly on us and not Mox.)
The large music events are my favorite thing in the world. We could put them on elsewhere, but I think they'd be ~50% of the current crowd size (and we probably have room to comfortably 1.5x the current crowd at Mox). I don't want to overstate how helpful these events are for building a community around Mox, but my understanding is that attendees who have made donations to support the event or to support Mox for hosting for the event have this as a pretty primary motivation.
On (2), I basically think the claim below which Mox make above is correct.
In a single year on a shoestring budget, we've become a primary nexus for the AI safety community and other EA-adjacent work in San Francisco.
Now, in some ways I think this reflects a sad state of affairs! It seems to me obvious that the AI safety community should have more presence in SF. In particular, I think Constellation should move to SF. If a Constellation office was set up separate from Mox in SF I expect that, by default, it would become the primary nexus for safety work. Then there's some question of what the comparative advantage of each place would be, and so on. But for now it's clearly true that Mox is the only game in town in SF.
I think the dumb case for some sort of AIS space to exist in SF is obvious -- good work often benefits or emerges from in-person connections, in expensive cities it's helpful to have dedicated in-person space to make this happen; SF is the center of AI work. Now, I think there are some obvious things to enable this vision which I don't see Mox doing much of (e.g. happy hours with staff from major AI companies). But I have enough faith in the basic vision + confidence in the founders to be excited to back Mox for their funding goals.
@joel_bkr thank you so much!
(1) I'm very grateful for all the events you host! Especially for the live band karaoke, which brings such an energy and joy to the space. (And for completeness' sake, Joel also threw his birthday party last year at Mox, because his hundreds of friends would not fit in our house.)
(2) agreed on all counts!
- The AI safety community should invest more in SF, where the AI labs/startups/funders are. This was the original thesis behind starting Mox, and it seems just as true now as a year ago.
- I too wish Constellation would move to SF, and expect they would be the default safety nexus if they did move. We love our competitors! Unfortunately, from convos with Constellation people, no such move seems likely to happen soon (eg within the next 6mo), if ever.
- I do feel like we're falling short on some obvious good things from having a hub in SF, AIS happy hours being one such example. Some of this is because, at our current level of funding, we spend a lot of our time chasing random opportunities to pay our bills (eg leasing offices to tech startups). Some is from a lack of personnel; I would love to hire someone who deeply knows the SF scene around the AI labs & safety, but I don't have any such candidate lined up (please lmk if you have someone in mind). Some are just unforced errors, and we'll aim to do better in 2026!
My own 2 cents, we're not competing with Constellation! If Constellation did move to SF separately from us, then competition would naturally arise, and I would want us to rethink what we were doing with Mox. As it happens, the cities of SF and Berkeley are competing for AI safety attention, and we're doing a similar thing for SF as Constellation is for Berkeley. Likewise, any merit we win for ourselves is no demerit to them, nor vice versa. I am curious where you see competition arising!
Mox is amazing. Great team and great space. One of the first places I visited in the US, and would love to come again next time.
I've only visited once but really enjoyed the space and community there. I appreciated the chance to meet others interested in AI safety, and organic conversations with others that sparked new ideas or chances for future collaboration. Great to see endorsements from others here that I trust and admire for their field/org-building in the community (e.g. Seldon Lab). The hard work of the AI safety community needs physical space for gathering and co-creation.
Blabbering about how awesome/moving/great of a space Mox is could be my full time job atp. A grand space, with great people who have noble objectives and kind hearts.