$1M Grant Round Plan - grantmaking.ai This grant round is designed to jumpstart grantmaking.ai - a public repository of funding opportunities in AI Safety, where funders can collaborate on…
$1M Grant Round Plan - grantmaking.ai This grant round is designed to jumpstart grantmaking.ai - a public repository of funding opportunities in AI Safety, where funders can collaborate on…
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What this application is for
$1M Grant Round Plan - grantmaking.ai
This grant round is designed to jumpstart grantmaking.ai - a public repository of funding opportunities in AI Safety, where funders can collaborate on evaluating and funding high quality projects and grantees can seek funding from multiple funders at the same time.
$1M has been sourced for this grant round, with more money willing to flow through the platform if it works.
Team:
Matt Brooks is the lead developer of grantmaking.ai.
Austin Chen is advising the project, and Manifund will handle the distribution of the money.
Anton Makiievskyi is one of the originators of the idea of the platform, rounded up Matt, Austin, and others to help build it, and is the funder of the grant round.
Grant Round Goals:
Make many projects / orgs share their funding goals, theory of change, and other relevant information, so our database is the most comprehensive and up to date as it can be.
Generate public and private reviews, endorsements, and concerns from both grantmakers and volunteers, to add a high quality signal layer on top of the data.
Distribute $1M in impactful grants sized $5k - $50k. We choose grants under $50k, because this check size is mostly overlooked by major funders like CG and Longview.
Proposed structure of this round:
Requirements to grantees:
Project must be aimed at x-risk from AI
Must be compliant to receive charitable funding
Serve a charitable, educational, or scientific public-benefit purpose.
No political campaigns and lobbying
The application can be request any amount of funding, but we’ll only grant $5k - $50k in total per applicant
During the grant round, the applicants must commit to update their profile as soon as they receive funding commitments from anywhere (could be with a source or without, posted publicly or privately)
If the project receives funding through our platform - we require committing to quarterly updates for the duration of the project (more frequent updates are encouraged). Updates can be minimal - think of it as an email to your donors who asked “how has the project been going”
The applicants are encouraged to have all of their application public, but are allowed to have some parts of it only visible to a private group consisting of approved grant reviewers and funders.
The parts of the application that we require to post publicly are below. These sections must also be 100% human-written. AI writing in this section will disqualify the applicant:
What would the grant money be used for and what is the theory of change (how does this project lead to decreasing p-doom) - 1 paragraph to 1 page in length.
Minimum amount of money that makes the project happen.
The other items that we strongly encourage to be posted publicly as well, but can be private, are listed below. This can be AI written, but content only written by AI will likely score lower from reviewers.
Full proposal at various levels of detail
Budget in as much detail as possible
Team in as much detail as possible
If the grant request is time-sensitive or urgent, if so, why
Optional but encouraged information:
A recent application to any other funder
Historical funding received from other sources
We will keep applications open until the grant money runs out, but the ones submitted after the initial deadline are not guaranteed a review.
Among others, we’ll consider applications for career changes or exploratory work, on the basis of work done previously.
Grantmaker duties - application review and grant distribution:
We’re aiming to collaborate with 3 grantmakers with recognizable names to have them each distribute up to $250k in grants $5k - $50k (above their funding bar) over a ~3 week period.
Grantmakers are only obligated to leave public comments on applications they choose to fund.
We'll let applicants re-apply with the same application the following month and be considered for another 50k and so on.
Each grant approval has to come with a public approval message.
All of the grants applications submitted before the deadline must be split between grantmakers, such that each applications gets considered by at least one of them
Rough schedule (open to adjusting for regrantor schedules):
June 15: Launch, promo, start accepting applications
June 22: Applications due (guaranteed review) - late applications are allowed but not guaranteed to be reviewed
June 29: Regrantor initial pass due, regrantors trash the obvious bad ones, and pick the applications they would like to review in more detail, then we randomly assign (or somehow coordinate) the rest of the unpicked applications.
July 13: Final grant allocations + comments due
In more detail, we’ll ask grantmakers to:
Do a quick pass and pick applications that they are willing to look at in more detail, and rate D or F on applications they think are very likely below the bar or clearly not applicable / fundable applications.
The remaining applications we’ll split randomly between grantmakers. We’ll allocate up to a 100 of applications per grantmaker. (if we get more than 300 non “F” applications we will hire more regrantors)
Once the quick pass is complete and all grants are distributed to the reviewers, a more detailed pass is done. Grantmakers optionally have a chat with applicants as needed, and then provide a rating for each application.
S: best grant you expect to make this year
A: One of your most exciting grants in this batch
B: Pretty good, likely above the bar
C: Solid, warrants more investigation
D: Skeptical, but you could imagine being persuaded
F: Not applicable / clearly not fundable
Ideally write a short elaboration for each rating, even a single sentence is great.
The grantmaker rating and private comments are not visible on the website, only visible to other reviewers and closed group of funders. But we show to the public that someone has left a private comment.
When a grantmarker officially approves a grant they must make a public grant approval message which will be posted on the platform.
When the application has been opened by the grantmaker, we indicate it as “viewed” on the platform. This is to indicate to the applicant that it has been considered.
We show the progress bar indicating how much money is left in the round, so that once the money runs out, the applicants can safely assume they have been rejected this time.
Additionally we’ll encourage the public / volunteers to submit their questions, endorsements (public), and leave public and private comments (private for negative feedback / whistleblowing, etc.).
We’ll add this messaging in the launch messaging and on the website:
We're aiming scale grantmaking.ai and may, in the future, hire part-time or full-time grant reviewers. $100k of funding has been set aside in this round to give as regrantor budgets to top commenters, as decided by the grantmaking.ai team.
Open questions:
How many applications do we expect to receive and will we have enough grantmaker time to review them
Ideally we’d have an experienced grantmaker to “own” this grant round, because I expect questions will come up along the way and I’m afraid we’ll lack expertise to decide
People
Updated 06/16/26 · By grantmaking.aiteam_member
Project Details
Updated 06/16/26 · Provided via application · Verified$1M Grant Round Plan - grantmaking.ai
This grant round is designed to jumpstart grantmaking.ai - a public repository of funding opportunities in AI Safety, where funders can collaborate on evaluating and funding high quality projects and grantees can seek funding from multiple funders at the same time.
$1M has been sourced for this grant round, with more money willing to flow through the platform if it works.
Team:
Matt Brooks is the lead developer of grantmaking.ai.
Austin Chen is advising the project, and Manifund will handle the distribution of the money.
Anton Makiievskyi is one of the originators of the idea of the platform, rounded up Matt, Austin, and others to help build it, and is the funder of the grant round.
Grant Round Goals:
Make many projects / orgs share their funding goals, theory of change, and other relevant information, so our database is the most comprehensive and up to date as it can be.
Generate public and private reviews, endorsements, and concerns from both grantmakers and volunteers, to add a high quality signal layer on top of the data.
Distribute $1M in impactful grants sized $5k - $50k. We choose grants under $50k, because this check size is mostly overlooked by major funders like CG and Longview.
Proposed structure of this round:
Requirements to grantees:
Project must be aimed at x-risk from AI
Must be compliant to receive charitable funding
Serve a charitable, educational, or scientific public-benefit purpose.
No political campaigns and lobbying
The application can be request any amount of funding, but we’ll only grant $5k - $50k in total per applicant
During the grant round, the applicants must commit to update their profile as soon as they receive funding commitments from anywhere (could be with a source or without, posted publicly or privately)
If the project receives funding through our platform - we require committing to quarterly updates for the duration of the project (more frequent updates are encouraged). Updates can be minimal - think of it as an email to your donors who asked “how has the project been going”
The applicants are encouraged to have all of their application public, but are allowed to have some parts of it only visible to a private group consisting of approved grant reviewers and funders.
The parts of the application that we require to post publicly are below. These sections must also be 100% human-written. AI writing in this section will disqualify the applicant:
What would the grant money be used for and what is the theory of change (how does this project lead to decreasing p-doom) - 1 paragraph to 1 page in length.
Minimum amount of money that makes the project happen.
The other items that we strongly encourage to be posted publicly as well, but can be private, are listed below. This can be AI written, but content only written by AI will likely score lower from reviewers.
Full proposal at various levels of detail
Budget in as much detail as possible
Team in as much detail as possible
If the grant request is time-sensitive or urgent, if so, why
Optional but encouraged information:
A recent application to any other funder
Historical funding received from other sources
We will keep applications open until the grant money runs out, but the ones submitted after the initial deadline are not guaranteed a review.
Among others, we’ll consider applications for career changes or exploratory work, on the basis of work done previously.
Grantmaker duties - application review and grant distribution:
We’re aiming to collaborate with 3 grantmakers with recognizable names to have them each distribute up to $250k in grants $5k - $50k (above their funding bar) over a ~3 week period.
Grantmakers are only obligated to leave public comments on applications they choose to fund.
We'll let applicants re-apply with the same application the following month and be considered for another 50k and so on.
Each grant approval has to come with a public approval message.
All of the grants applications submitted before the deadline must be split between grantmakers, such that each applications gets considered by at least one of them
Rough schedule (open to adjusting for regrantor schedules):
June 15: Launch, promo, start accepting applications
June 22: Applications due (guaranteed review) - late applications are allowed but not guaranteed to be reviewed
June 29: Regrantor initial pass due, regrantors trash the obvious bad ones, and pick the applications they would like to review in more detail, then we randomly assign (or somehow coordinate) the rest of the unpicked applications.
July 13: Final grant allocations + comments due
In more detail, we’ll ask grantmakers to:
Do a quick pass and pick applications that they are willing to look at in more detail, and rate D or F on applications they think are very likely below the bar or clearly not applicable / fundable applications.
The remaining applications we’ll split randomly between grantmakers. We’ll allocate up to a 100 of applications per grantmaker. (if we get more than 300 non “F” applications we will hire more regrantors)
Once the quick pass is complete and all grants are distributed to the reviewers, a more detailed pass is done. Grantmakers optionally have a chat with applicants as needed, and then provide a rating for each application.
S: best grant you expect to make this year
A: One of your most exciting grants in this batch
B: Pretty good, likely above the bar
C: Solid, warrants more investigation
D: Skeptical, but you could imagine being persuaded
F: Not applicable / clearly not fundable
Ideally write a short elaboration for each rating, even a single sentence is great.
The grantmaker rating and private comments are not visible on the website, only visible to other reviewers and closed group of funders. But we show to the public that someone has left a private comment.
When a grantmarker officially approves a grant they must make a public grant approval message which will be posted on the platform.
When the application has been opened by the grantmaker, we indicate it as “viewed” on the platform. This is to indicate to the applicant that it has been considered.
We show the progress bar indicating how much money is left in the round, so that once the money runs out, the applicants can safely assume they have been rejected this time.
Additionally we’ll encourage the public / volunteers to submit their questions, endorsements (public), and leave public and private comments (private for negative feedback / whistleblowing, etc.).
We’ll add this messaging in the launch messaging and on the website:
We're aiming scale grantmaking.ai and may, in the future, hire part-time or full-time grant reviewers. $100k of funding has been set aside in this round to give as regrantor budgets to top commenters, as decided by the grantmaking.ai team.
Open questions:
How many applications do we expect to receive and will we have enough grantmaker time to review them
Ideally we’d have an experienced grantmaker to “own” this grant round, because I expect questions will come up along the way and I’m afraid we’ll lack expertise to decide
Grants Received
Updated 06/16/26 · By grantmaking.aiDiscussion
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