What does the Future of Life Institute (FLI) work on?
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit started in 2014 that aims to reduce large-scale risks from AI and other causes, such as biotechnology, nuclear war, and climate change.
FLI divides its work into:
- Policy and research, which includes publishing a safety index for each major AI company; advising policy makers on policies such as the AI Action Plan, executive orders, and the EU AI act; and making recommendations to address the interaction of AI with nuclear, biological, and cyber threats.
- Futures, which includes creating storytelling projects about positive futures, exploring religious perspectives on AI, and studying risks of AI concentrating power.
- Outreach, which includes publishing open letters such as the 2023 “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter and the 2025 Statement on Superintelligence; supporting video and other content on existential risk from AI; creating videos, guides, and open letters on autonomous weapons (including a viral short film on “slaughterbots”); producing a podcast; and presenting the Future of Life award for contributions to the future of the world such as preventing nuclear war during close calls.
- Grantmaking, which includes grants to support organizations as well as fellowships to support individuals doing various kinds of relevant work, such as PhD research on US-China collaboration in AI governance or on technical AI safety. FLI also organizes an AI existential safety community. An affiliated organization, the Future of Life Foundation (FLF), has run a fellowship for AI to improve human reasoning and is focused on incubating new organizations. (FLI received a 665 million dollar cryptocurrency donation from Vitalik Buterin in 2021.1)
- Events such as the Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI, which resulted in the Asilomar AI Principles.
As of October 2025, FLI’s current efforts focus on research, education, and outreach aimed at steering governments and companies away from racing toward superintelligence.
However, “FLI converted this asset to dollars at a significantly lower average price than it held on the donation date.” The “vast majority...has been transferred to a donor-advised fund and other nonprofit entities that primarily provide asset management services.” ↩︎