Today, we’re announcing a $7.5 million grant to The Alignment Project⁠(opens in a new window), a global fund for independent alignment research created by the UK AI Security Institute (UK AISI). Renaissance Philanthropy is supporting the grant’s administration. This contribution helps make The Alignment Project one of the largest dedicated funding efforts for independent alignment research to date and strengthens the broader, independent ecosystem.

Frontier labs like OpenAI are in a unique position to pursue alignment research that depends on access to frontier models and significant compute—work that is often difficult for independent researchers to explore. We devote much of our internal alignment effort to developing scalable methods so that alignment progress keeps pace with capability progress. We believe iterative deployment—gradually increasing capabilities while strengthening safeguards—helps surface problems early and gives us concrete evidence about what works in practice, and that responsible development requires significant alignment and safety work that is tightly integrated with model building and deployment.

In parallel, the field benefits from sustained investment in independent, exploratory research—which can expand the space of ideas and uncover new directions. Independent research remains essential; in many kinds of useful inquiry, labs do not retain a comparative advantage. A healthy alignment ecosystem depends on independent teams testing diverse assumptions, developing alternative frameworks, and exploring conceptual, theoretical, and blue-sky ideas that may not align neatly with any one organization’s roadmap.

And because progress toward AGI may ultimately depend on fundamental breakthroughs that change the shape of the alignment problem and which approaches are most useful, it’s important to support research that would matter even if today’s dominant methods turn out not to scale in the way we expect. In those worlds, it becomes especially important to have a strong external ecosystem doing foundational, conceptual, and uncorrelated work. The problem of AI alignment and safety is of unprecedented importance, and we need all hands on deck as we do not yet know which approaches will prove most durable as capabilities continue to advance.