Mission

BERI is an independent 501(c)(3) public charity. Our mission is to improve human civilization’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing. Currently, our main strategy is to take on ethical and legal responsibility, as a collaborator, for projects deemed to be important for reducing existential risk. These projects mostly revolve around reducing risk from technologies that may pose significant civilization-scale dangers, as determined by research collaborators who have adopted existential risk reduction as both their primary career ambition and their primary area of intellectual focus.

What we do

Human civilization currently lacks a sufficiently coordinated and influential effort to ensure the continued existence of our species. BERI wants to help solve that problem, fast. We've identified a few organizations that are staffed with full-time researchers working to reduce existential risk, who we’re committed to helping in their missions, including:

CHAI - the Center for Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley

CSER - the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University

FHI - the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University

We think of these organizations and their surrounding networks as forming what we call “the x-risk ecosystem”—a network of think tanks, non-profits, individual researchers, philanthropists, and others, all working to reduce existential risk. Our goal is to support this ecosystem by providing a source of flexible funding and nimble human capital for its most important and neglected projects. By finding and solving problems that are common across organizations, we hope to add another vector of coordination to the x-risk ecosystem, accelerating humanity’s progress toward eliminating existential risks.