Longview Philanthropy

The Emerging Challenges Fund supports organisations that address global security risks from emerging technologies.

What kind of work does the Emerging Challenges Fund support?

Longview believe 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 will unlock new biological and cyber capabilities for malicious actors, stress our struggling democratic institutions, and accelerate scientific and economic progress like never before. Meanwhile, it is not clear we are either ready to face the next deadly pandemic or equipped to navigate escalating geopolitical tensions, as global superpowers build more nuclear weapons, of more types, on more platforms.

Longview’s ECF aims to prepare the world for these challenges. Through the ECF, Longview funds projects and organisations that meet their usual grantmaking criteria and align with two further key considerations.

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

In 2024, the ECF allocated over half its funding to civil society organizations invited to help draft the EU AI Act's Code of Practice. This approach aligned with the ECF's focus, offering a clear path to impact by providing expertise to those shaping the AI Act's implementation and access to diverse funding sources so that grantees can remain credibly independent from any single interest group. Longview aims for this to exemplify the ECF's grantmaking strategy—quickly supporting clear opportunities that other philanthropists overlook.

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 2023
• August 2023
• December 2022

Why donate to the Emerging Challenges Fund?

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.

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.