Our last major public updates on the Open Philanthropy Project were our May and June posts on global catastrophic risks and U.S. policy. This post summarizes our progress since then and where we currently stand on our goal of committing to causes.

Summary of currently ongoing activities

Our current plans

Within U.S. policy, our top contenders for priority causes are labor mobility and criminal justice reform. We have also done substantial work (including some preliminary grants) on macroeconomic policy.

Within global catastrophic risks, our top contenders for priority causes are biosecurity and geoengineering, though there are several causes that we see as potential contenders and are still working on investigating, including risks associated with artificial intelligence.

Our current focus is on committing to causes within the broad categories of U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks. We’ve published a spreadsheet summary of our current stances on the causes we’ve investigated, and which ones we consider to be the strongest contenders based on what we know today. In brief:

Before committing to causes, we are hoping to:

Investigate more potential causes at shallow and/or medium depth.

Do relatively deep investigations of the top contenders, and gain a more tangible sense of what our strategy and grantmaking would likely look like if we committed to these causes.

Hold convenings in which a small number of people with relevant experience provides feedback on our thinking. We are planning a convening for November in Washington, D.C. on the subject of our priorities within U.S. policy. We are still deciding whether and how to conduct a convening around global catastrophic risks (currently leaning against doing so).

Put more thought into how many, and what level, of “commitments to causes” we should make given our current capacity.

We are still hoping to commit to causes in these categories by the end of the calendar year, though we still see this as a stretch goal and see a reasonable probability that we’ll delay by a couple of months. As a lower priority, I am working on investigating possible approaches to scientific research funding, and hope to provide more updates on this front fairly soon.

Grants

Good Ventures has made a number of grants within potential priority causes, largely as a way of exploring what giving opportunities in these causes might look like (more on this idea at a previous post ). These grants have been in top contender areas for U.S. policy (labor mobility, criminal justice reform and macroeconomic policy); there are likely to be some grants within some global catastrophic risk areas as well in the near future. A list of grants to date is available here