Did you know there’s something called the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and right now it’s giving away $20 to $40 million in grants. The application deadline is April 22nd. 😱
I’m personally involved as a recommender in the 2026 round, and I’m here to make sure you don’t miss this. If you have a project that could help the world — particularly around AI existential risk — you should apply ASAP!
What Is the Survival and Flourishing Fund?
The Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a grantmaking program funded by Jaan Tallinn, one of the most prolific funders of charitable causes in the AI safety and effective altruism ecosystem.
Jaan was a core team member on Kazaa, then a founding engineer at Skype, then got into crypto early and did well. He started an investment arm called Metaplanet and led the Series A for a couple companies you might have heard of: “DeepMind” and “Anthropic”. He’s one of the largest shareholders of Anthropic right now.
There’s a delicious irony to this whole funding round. As we watch Anthropic take off and generate enormous value in AI capabilities, some of that wealth is flowing back through one of their earliest investors into charitable causes — including existential risk reduction. You could, in a very real sense, take some of Anthropic’s money and use it for good.
What Gets Funded?
It all comes down to Jaan’s philanthropic priorities.
AI Extinction Risk
This is priority number one — reducing humanity’s risk of destroying itself with AI. As Jaan writes on his website: “I wish more people would wake up to this issue since literally everyone under the age of 60 is personally at risk.”
He breaks AI extinction risk work into two categories:
Restrictive efforts — things like certifications on large data centers, speed limits on training runs, liability laws, labeling requirements (disclosing whether you’re interacting with a human or a machine), veto committees for large-scale model deployments, and global off switches. There is so much technology and policy work to be done across all of these.
Constructive efforts — approaches that accept AI may be coming regardless and try to make it go as well as possible. This includes collective intelligence enhancement, AI health tech, “protective moralities” that could help an uncontrollable AI treat us well (even as a last-ditch effort, it’s better than nothing), guaranteed safe AI through human-legible quantitative safety guidelines, and hardware-level controls like automatic shutdown and reporting conditions.
Some of these constructive efforts look a lot like restrictive efforts, just resigned to AI already arriving — running behind the train instead of standing in front of it holding a stop sign. But the philosophy is simple: throw everything at the problem. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The Tracks: Freedom and Fairness
Beyond the main track (where I’m a recommender, alongside five others), SFF runs two specialized tracks:
The Freedom Track asks: how can we avoid concentrations of authority and support uses of AI that strengthen freedom for humans and humanity? This includes protecting meaningful freedom of speech, ensuring the continuation of individual liberties like privacy and private property, and maintaining sovereignty for self-governing territories. (If you’ve heard Vitalik Buterin’s episode on Doom Debates about d/acc, this will resonate.)
The Fairness Track starts from the premise that AI is a force multiplier for those who wish to control others. It asks: how can we support the use of AI to empower the disempowered? This means empowering the global majority with regard to AI technology, resisting monopolistic practices in AI development, diffusing conflicts and abuses of power, and fostering inclusivity in AI governance.
Each of these tracks has three dedicated recommenders evaluating applications. If you’ve ever thought, “Why is everyone focused on the technology of preventing AI from killing us? What about the scenario where we’re all still alive but dealing with massive unfairness?” — well, SFF has an entire track with $3 million-plus in funding just for that.
Theme Rounds
SFF also runs theme rounds in climate change, animal welfare, and human self-enhancement. Jaan has thought of everything — spreading his bets like a good investor across different possible futures and different mechanisms of impact.
How the Process Works
You submit an application. That’s it. It’s not a super hard application — you detail what you’re doing, how much money you need, and what you’ll spend it on.
Once submitted, there’s a two-phase process:
Phase 1: Speculation Grants. About 40 speculators — including names like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Andrew Critch, David Kruger, Oliver Habryka, Roman Yampolskiy, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, and Zvi Mowshowitz — evaluate applications and may issue smaller initial grants. An individual speculator’s budget is on the order of $250,000, so these grants are smaller but fast: you could hear back as early as May 6th.
Phase 2: The S-Process. A dozen recommenders (including me) each direct roughly $3–4 million in funding recommendations. Getting a speculation grant in Phase 1 actually helps your case in Phase 2 — it’s a signal that someone knowledgeable found your project promising, and it reduces the amount you’re asking for. The bulk of the money from this phase arrives around late 2026.
The whole thing runs on an impact market mechanism. Speculators and recommenders who identify great projects get rewarded with bigger budgets in future rounds. It’s a prediction-market-style incentive system designed by the kind of rational, technical people you’d expect — Jaan Tallinn, Andrew Critch, Oliver Habryka.
But honestly, you don’t need to worry about these mechanics. Just do the application and get the money.
Who Can Apply?
For-profits, nonprofits, and even individuals with a fiscal sponsor can all apply.
If you don’t have a charity or nonprofit, that’s not a blocker. Fiscal sponsors are easy to find. Doom Debates is just my own organization — a sole proprietorship, hardly even an organization — and I’m fiscally sponsored by Manifund. I went to manifund.org, signed up, got a quick approval, and now people can make tax-deductible donations through them. The whole thing took about an hour.
There are plenty of organizations that will fiscally sponsor you. If the lack of an organizational structure has been the thing stopping you, that excuse just evaporated.
The Deadline Is April 22nd — and I Already Procrastinated for You
I’ll be blunt: this video is coming late. I already procrastinated most of the time you had to prepare your application, which means you don’t get to procrastinate. There’s no more procrastinating left. You need to get your application out now.
If you miss the April 22nd deadline by even a few days, your chances of getting accepted drop dramatically. They’re really not doing the late application thing. And on the flip side, early applications get a bit more attention and slightly better odds.
👉 CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR SFF FUNDING 👈
Everything else I’m saying is overkill compared to the advice to apply for funding.
One Tip for Your Application
Zvi Mowshowitz recently wrote about this, and it echoes what I’ve seen reviewing Y Combinator applications in the past: please make it crystal clear what you’re actually doing. You’d be surprised how many applications are nearly impossible to understand from the first few sentences. Don’t bury your project description in jargon or vague framing. State what you’re doing, clearly, in the opening lines.
If you want, email me at
[email protected] and ask, “Is this a clear description of what we’re doing?” I’ll tell you yes or no, and you can tweak it before you submit. Happy to do that.
Why I Care About This
I think the Survival and Flourishing Fund is wildly under-hyped. This is human civilization actually getting its act together — deploying real money to real causes, evaluated by people who know what they’re talking about. These aren’t random, tangential causes. These are shots on goal for some of the biggest problems I can imagine, funded at a scale that can actually make the future go better.
Some of you watching this might be thinking: “Funding is great for people who already run charities, but I’m just a person with an idea.” I’m here to tell you — just do the idea. You can get the money. The money is one application away. Get a fiscal sponsor (one hour), fill out the application, hit submit. You’ll either get a grant or a polite rejection. That’s it.
If your project is valuable to humanity, this fund exists to make it happen. Don’t let this deadline pass you by.
👉 CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR SFF FUNDING 👈
Good luck!
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