“Where I Am Donating in 2025” by MichaelDickens

Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I'm doing it again this year. Cross-posted to my website. Cause prioritization In September, I published a report on the AI safety landscape, specifically focusing on AI x-risk policy/advocacy. The prioritization section of the report explains why I focused on AI policy. It's similar to what I wrote about prioritization in my 2024 donations post, but more fleshed out. I won't go into detail on cause prioritization in this post because those two previous articles explain my thinking. My high-level prioritization is mostly unchanged since last year. In short: Existential risk is a big deal. AI misalignment risk is the biggest existential risk. Within AI x-risk, policy/advocacy is much more neglected than technical research. In the rest of this section, I will cover: What I want to achieve with my donations How I've changed my mind since last year How my confidence has increased since last year What I want my donations to achieve By donating, I want to increase the chances that we [...] ---Outline:(00:22) Cause prioritization(01:25) What I want my donations to achieve(04:32) There is no good plan(05:23) AI pause advocacy is the least-bad plan(06:22) How Ive changed my mind since last year(06:27) Im more concerned about non-alignment problems(07:02) Im more concerned about AI-for-animals(08:38) How my confidence has increased since last year(08:43) We should pause frontier AI development(09:03) Peaceful protests probably help(10:22) I have a high bar for who to trust(11:35) My favorite interventions(13:04) Organizations (tax-deductible)(13:50) AI-for-animals orgs(15:18) AI Safety and Governance Fund(15:54) Existential Risk Observatory(17:02) Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)(18:58) Palisade Research(19:41) PauseAI US(21:25) Video projects(21:50) Non-tax-deductible donation opportunities(22:28) AI Policy Network(23:21) Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI)(24:18) ControlAI(25:17) Congressional campaigns(26:17) Encode(26:54) Where Im donating The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 22nd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AGcny8oBxBDCjqxdr/where-i-am-donating-in-2025 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.