Emerging Challenges Fund

The Emerging Challenges Fund supports work that reduces existential and catastrophic risks, such as those coming from artificial intelligence, pandemics, and nuclear weapons.

The fund aims to be a strong donation option for a wide range of donors interested in these issues. The fund focuses on organisations that:

Have a compelling and transparent case in favour of their impact that most donors interested in these issues will understand; and/or
May benefit from being funded by a large number of donors (rather than a single organisation or donor).

Hundreds of donors have contributed to this effort.

Longview also offers bespoke education, grant recommendations, and grant outcome reporting to donors giving over $1 million per year. Please get in touch with our Founder & President Natalie Cargill at natalie.enquiries@longview.org.

Featured Grants

Interpretability at Harvard University

Looking inside modern AI systems

Frontier AI models are a black box. Today we have almost no ability to understand why the most powerful AI systems make the decision that they do, making AI systems unpredictable and difficult to align with human values. A new lab at Harvard University is trying to change that through their work on “mechanistic interpretability”, a field of research to understand how networks function internally. On our recommended grant, Harvard researchers will progress their work to locate specific concepts and facts within a neural network.

Blueprint Biosecurity far-UVC work

Testing technology for clean air

Certain wavelengths of germicidal light called ‘far-UVC’ inactivate pathogens in the air and on surfaces while appearing to be safe for humans. Could this be a powerful tool for reducing the spread of infectious disease, and even stop or slow the next outbreak which would become a pandemic? This funding will be used to commission research into how much far-UVC is likely to reduce pathogen transmission, and its safety profile, making it possible to understand how best to deploy it.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Studying escalation pathways to nuclear war

This recommendation was for a project aiming to develop a common understanding about escalation pathways to nuclear war and what policy interventions are most likely to contribute to risk mitigation. Specifically, the project will involve research workshops whereby a diverse range of experts within fields relevant to nuclear security and risk analysis convene to analyse potential escalation pathways, attempt to estimate their likelihood, identify potential levers to reduce or mitigate this risk, and compare these various pathways and levers more holistically.

More Detail on all Grants

December 2023 Grants Report

August 2023 Grants Report

December 2022 Grants Report

Disclosures

The Emerging Challenges Fund is managed by Giving What We Can with recommendations from Longview Philanthropy. Giving What We Can is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures (UK) (EV UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US). Donations to the Emerging Challenges Fund are donations to EV US or EV UK. Please see important state disclosures here.

Fund Managers

Page Hedley

AI Programme Director

Page is an AI Programme Director at Longview Philanthropy. Prior to joining Longview, he worked on AI governance at OpenAI and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and co-founded the Forecasting Research Institute. A lawyer by training, he spent five years as a litigator at Williams & Connolly LLP before pivoting to philanthropy and the governance of emerging technology.

Simran Dhaliwal

CEO

Simran coordinates Longview Philanthropy’s research, grantmaking, and advocacy work. Prior to joining, she was a research analyst at Goldman Sachs, working on a two-person team recognised as the best sell-side stockpickers in London in 2018. While there, she also became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and was donating to high-impact charities.

Carl Robichaud

Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Officer

Carl co-leads Longview’s programme on nuclear weapons policy, and co-manages Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. Carl previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation.