“My 2025 donations (so far)” by richard_ngo

Here's a list of my donations so far this year (put together as part of thinking through whether I and others should participate in an OpenAI equity donation round). I originally posted them to LessWrong as a shortform, but since donations are a more central topic on the EA forum I decided to make it a top-level post here.

They are roughly in chronological order (though it's possible I missed one or two). I include some thoughts on what I've learned and what I'm now doing differently at the bottom.

1. $100k to Lightcone
   1. This grant was largely motivated by my respect for Oliver Habryka's quality of thinking and personal judgment.
   2. This ended up being matched by the Survival and Flourishing Fund (though I didn't know it would be when I made it). Note that they'll continue matching donations to Lightcone until the end of March 2026.
2. $50k to the Alignment of Complex Systems (ACS) research group
   1. This grant was largely motivated by my respect for Jan Kulveit's philosophical and technical thinking.
3. $20k to Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel for support with running agent foundations conferences.
4. ~$25k to Inference Magazine to host a public debate on the plausibility of [...]

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First published:
November 29th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CMxrGfRiL3vYsWxxW/my-2025-donations-so-far

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.