Longview Philanthropy

What kind of work does the Emerging Challenges Fund support?

The Emerging Challenges Fund supports organisations that address global security risks from emerging technologies. It is managed by Longview Philanthropy, a philanthropic advisory for major donors who want to do the most good possible with their giving, with a focus on safely navigating emerging technologies.

Longview believes the next decade brings significant challenges at the intersection of emerging technologies and global security—challenges we are unprepared to meet. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, for example, could bring democratic processes under unprecedented strain, lower the barriers for malicious actors to carry out large-scale biological or cyber attacks, and accelerate scientific and economic progress like never before. At present, we are neither ready to face the next deadly pandemic nor equipped to navigate escalating geopolitical tensions, as global superpowers build more nuclear weapons, of more types, on more platforms.

The ECF aims to prepare the world for these challenges by funding promising projects addressing global security risks. It supports organisations that meet Longview’s general grantmaking criteria, with preference given to projects that pass two further tests:

1. Does the project have a legible theory of impact? ECF grantees must have a compelling and transparent case in favour of their impact that a range of donors will understand and appreciate.
2. Will the project benefit from diverse funding? Often, support by a large number of donors, rather than a single organisation or donor, is of particular value.

Longview shared:

In 2024, we allocated over half of the ECF to civil society organisations invited to help draft the EU AI Act's Code of Practice. These grants were especially well-suited for the Fund, as (i) providing expertise to those shaping the implementation of the EU AI Act is both vitally important and legible, and (ii) it is important that these civil society organisations are funded through diverse funding sources and can remain credibly independent from any single interest group, and (iii) the Fund allowed us to make the grants quickly to fill an urgent need. We aim for this to exemplify the ECF's grantmaking strategy—quickly supporting clear opportunities that other philanthropists overlook or are not well-suited to support.

For those seeking to invest in a safer future, the Emerging Challenges Fund provides unique expertise across beneficial AI, biosecurity, and nuclear weapons policy. It fills critical funding gaps at organisations in need of rapid financial support and a diversity of donors. Donate today to the ECF.

Grants so far

The Emerging Challenges Fund has awarded grants to several organisations and projects aligned with its key priorities, including:

• METR — METR works on “assessing whether cutting-edge AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to civilization.”
• SecureBio — SecureBio is a nonprofit working alongside the MIT Sculpting Evolution Group on highly targeted projects seeking to prevent or respond to the next pandemic.
• The Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — CEIP’s nuclear policy program aims to develop a better understanding of the most dangerous nuclear escalation pathways and identify and promote policy interventions to mitigate risks.

See the full list of grant recipients by viewing the grant reports below:

• December 2024
• December 2023
• August 2023
• December 2022

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Emerging Challenges Fund?^1.

As part of our work evaluating evaluators, we investigated Longview’s grantmaking. After doing so, we decided to recommend the fund because:

• Longview has solid grantmaking processes in place to find highly cost-effective funding opportunities.
• In the grants we evaluated, we generally saw these processes working as intended, which makes us optimistic about the cost-effectiveness of the grants.
• The scope and structure of the Emerging Challenges Fund is — by design — consistent with what we are looking for with our Risks and Resilience Fund: a fund that makes grants that are relevant and understandable to a wide variety of donors looking to reduce global catastrophic risks.

We don’t know of any clearly better alternative donation option in reducing GCRs.

If you’re interested in learning more about Longview, we recommend reading our evaluation report. For a more casual introduction, see this video with one of the fund managers: Longview’s CEO, Simran Dhaliwal.

Note: We were involved in the creation of the fund and initially managed its communications by writing the grant reports and public updates. In November 2023, we stepped down from this role, and now Longview is fully responsible for the fund. We did this so that we could come to a more impartial decision on whether to recommend the fund, based on independently evaluating Longview’s grantmaking.

Fund managers

The fund’s grantmaking will be informed by all of Longview’s work, and therefore everyone in their team plays a role. The fund managers are:

• Simran Dhaliwal— CEO of Longview Philanthropy
• Page Hedley — AI Programme Director at Longview Philanthropy
• Carl Robichaud— Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Director at Longview Philanthropy

FAQ

How are grants decided?

Longview Philanthropy aims to fund the most cost-effective organisations that fit within the fund’s mandate. Longview’s evaluation of cost effectiveness is informed by its past and ongoing work trying to find the most impactful organisations, as well as the work of other funders.

Sometimes, this will involve making grants to organisations where Longview’s team are especially involved (for example, having provided seed funding, conducted thorough evaluations, or helped catalyse the project’s formation). In other cases, Longview’s judgement of cost-effectiveness will be based on its independent judgement of evaluations done by other funders.

The size of the grants will be determined based on the resources given to the Emerging Challenges Fund and the overall funding needs of the organisations being considered.

What’s the difference between the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund?

We think the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) is also a compelling option for donors, though it makes different kinds of grants. We document these differences in more detail in our investigations of the LTFF and the Emerging Challenges Fund. The biggest difference is in the kinds of grants each fund makes: the LTFF is likely to support researchers early in their careers, or highly targeted outreach efforts to encourage more people to work to improve the long-term future. We ultimately don’t have a view on which fund is more cost-effective.

Will the Emerging Challenges Fund's grants cause other donors to give less to the same organisations?

In many cases, major funders will react to Emerging Challenges Fund grants by making smaller donations to the recipient organisations. These funders will then have resources freed up for supporting other longtermist projects, which we see as a good thing. However, if your values differ from these other funders, then you may disagree.

We suggest looking through Open Philanthropy’s grants to reduce global catastrophic risk to inform whether your values are in fact aligned with other funders in a similar space. You can also see some of the organisations Longview Philanthropy has supported in the past, but it is worth noting that many of their grant recommendations are not public.