AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund↗

Applications: By invitation
All 48 grants ↓Donate ↗
Funder·Founded 2023
“AISTOF is a pooled multi-donor charitable fund seeking to reduce the probability and severity of catastrophic risks associated with the development of advanced AI systems”In its own words: manifund.org
TechnicalGovernanceField-buildingCompute

Pooled multi-donor AI safety fund managed by JueYan Zhang, set up in September 2023 to make fast grants on emerging opportunities; it grants via Manifund and has backed the UK Alignment Project.

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A pooled multi-donor charitable fund for reducing catastrophic risks from advanced AI, set up to move quickly on emerging opportunities in governance, technical alignment and evaluations/audits. Its Manifund page does not describe an application or decision process.

Says it has given about $30M in total

Typical grant $46k ($7k–$300k)

On applying “the fund is structured to be fast and capture emerging opportunities in the rapidly changing landscape, including in governance, technical alignment, and evaluations / audit” manifund.org

Itemised here $5.3M in 48 grants

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Its grants page ↗Checked 29 Oct 2026

Money flows

Where its money came from and where it went. Pick years and what to show; hover a box or ribbon for details, click one to focus it, click the background to see everything.

How to apply

Applications
By invitation
Who can apply
Individuals, New organisations, Organisations, Academics

Post the project on Manifund: AISTOF funds projects there through its own Manifund account. You can also ask a past grantee for an introduction.

Programmes

Biggest recipients

Money from

Passed on to other funders

Gifts and pooled money between funders, as recorded on the site.

All grants

48 grants totalling $5.3M, newest first. Recipients link to their own pages; people who received grants without a public profile are shown by number.

2026 28 grants · $2.8M
DateRecipientAmountPurpose
4 Oct 2026Individual #4846$18kLiving support for Individual #4846
1 Sep 2026Individual #3721$390kExploring the Benefits of Alignment Pretraining
1 Sep 2026Individual #3721$83kCompute funding for five mentored AI safety research projects
1 Sep 2026Faithful Preference Learning: Cognitively-Aligned Post-Training$15kFaithful Preference Learning : Cognitively-Aligned Post-Training source
21 Aug 2026Individual #7377$35kFrontier AI Election Evaluation Framework
20 Aug 2026Separatrix$150kSeparatrix source
20 Aug 2026Individual #1186$50kPostdoc on verification protocols for frontier AI training
20 Aug 2026Individual #1124$33kWhat Factors Influence Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness?
20 Aug 2026BAISH$18kHelp the Argentinian AI Safety Community Grow source
20 Aug 2026Individual #7902$8kBelief state geometry of language model personas
19 Aug 2026Individual #7990$245kToward a Superhuman, Open-Ended Alignment Auditor
13 Aug 2026AI Safety Hong Kong$85kAI Safety Hong Kong (AISHK) source
17 Jul 2026Individual #9482$80kShutdown evaluations for AI agents
15 Jul 2026Individual #2219$15kKernelBench: an independent benchmark for AI-automated GPU kernel engineering
13 Jul 2026Individual #6788$77kConcept control in transformers with Sparse Concept Anchoring
7 Jul 2026Individual #4026$30k2026 European Frontier AI Safety Day
2 Jul 2026Individual #3031$150kAI Safety Workshops For 6th-8th Graders in India
28 Jun 2026Individual #3031$7kAI Nutrition Labels For Everyday Consumers & AI Agents: Travel + POC Grant
2 Apr 2026Individual #9196$50kEmergent misalignment and memetic replication in multi-agent codebases
31 Mar 2026Individual #6055$437kCollaboration Infrastructure for Safeguarding AI
19 Mar 2026Individual #6197$30kHuman-AI Complementarity for Identifying Harm
18 Mar 2026Individual #7211$5kDystopiaBench
15 Mar 2026Safe AI Germany (SAIGE)$80kSafe AI Germany (SAIGE) source
13 Mar 2026Mox$350kMox: 2026 Fundraiser source
4 Feb 2026Individual #2964$23kTowards Shared AI Compute Infrastructure
3 Feb 2026Individual #3031$3kHelp a Bootstrapped AI Risk Literacy Founder Get To IASEAI 2026 in Paris
2 Feb 2026Geodesic Research$200kSeed Funding For Geodesic Research source
2 Feb 2026AISA$100kAI Crisis Convening at India AI Impact Summit 2026 source
2025 17 grants · $2.2M
DateRecipientAmountPurpose
25 Dec 2025Individual #7173$121kIsolating CBRN Knowledge in LLMs for Safety - Phase 2 (Research)
3 Dec 2025Seldon$355kAI Security Startup Accelerator Batch #2 source
1 Dec 2025Act Write Here$250kBuilding an Infrastructure to Create High-Impact Narratives source
25 Nov 2025Individual #78758$4kVisa fee support for Australian researcher to join a fellowship with Anthropic
20 Nov 2025Individual #2755$128kFormal Certification Technologies for AI Safety
5 Nov 2025Individual #6275$26kGuaranteed Safe AI Seminars 2026
4 Nov 2025Individual #6075$39kSDCPNs for AI Safety
31 Oct 2025EquiStamp$400kOperating Capital for AI Safety Evaluation Infrastructure source
29 Oct 2025Individual #89398$20kFinish Video Game about AI Girlfriends and Social Peril
14 Oct 2025Luthien$125kLuthien source
14 Aug 2025Individual #4775$10kTransformerLens - Bridge Funding
6 Aug 2025Coordinal Research$110kCoordinal Research: Accelerating the research of safely deploying AI systems. source
22 Jul 2025Individual #2006$88kFunding researcher on frontier AI governance inclusive of global majority
9 May 2025Luthien$25kLuthien source
7 Apr 2025Laurence Aitchison$14kBayesian modelling of LLM capabilities from evals source
21 Jan 2025Michaël Rubens Trazzi$41kFinishing The SB-1047 Documentary source
2025Simon Institute for Longterm Governance~$412kRestricted grant of CHF 343,705 shown in the Simon Institute's 2025 financial report (converted at about $1.20/CHF, 2025 average) source
2024 3 grants · $374k
DateRecipientAmountPurpose
29 Feb 2024Individual #74424$13kStipend to enable a US PhD student to move to the UK for a temporary role with the UK DSIT
28 Feb 2024Individual #85124$3kVisa fee support for US researcher to take on a temporary role with the UK AISI
2024SaferAI~$358kContribution of €330,582 declared by SaferAI in the EU Transparency Register for financial year 2024 (converted at about $1.082/€, 2024 average) source