For nearly four decades, Foresight Institute has worked to identify, accelerate, and connect the people and ideas that have the potential to shape a better future. From AI safety and frontier science to biotechnology, nanotechnology, and emerging technologies, our mission has always been to support transformative work long before it becomes widely recognized.

An unrestricted donation gives us the flexibility to invest where support is needed most. It allows us to respond quickly to emerging opportunities, provide early support for promising researchers and builders, strengthen our educational and community programs, and expand the initiatives that have the greatest potential for long-term impact. Rather than being limited to a single program, your contribution helps sustain the entire ecosystem that makes Foresight’s work possible.

By supporting Foresight’s General Fund, you enable us to back ambitious ideas, empower exceptional talent, and build the collaborations that drive scientific and technological progress. Your donation helps ensure that breakthrough innovations are developed openly, responsibly, and for the benefit of humanity.

Existential Hope is Foresight’s effort to make the case — and build the tools — for futures worth wanting: futures where advanced AI, biotechnology, and other transformative technologies are developed safely, openly, and for the benefit of all of humanity, rather than concentrating power or risk in the hands of a few.

Rather than defaulting to doom-and-gloom narratives, our Existential Hope production studio produces podcasts, newsletters, world-building projects, and video content to make the public case for accelerating beneficial science and safe AI. 

By supporting Existential Hope, you help fund the storytelling, research, and community-building that makes positive futures feel possible — and worth building toward.

Foresight Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (Tax ID: 77-0119168), so your gift is tax-deductible in the US as allowed by law, less the value of any premiums of significant value received, in this case, 20% of the total cost for your  workshop ticket.

2026 marks our 40th anniversary, and we are celebrating by launching our biggest initiative to date – two physical AI Nodes in San Francisco and Berlin! The nodes will provide grant funding, local compute, project support, and office space for ambitious teams advancing decentralized, AI-powered science and safety. We support work in the following areas:

• AI for Security
• Private AI
• Decentralized & Cooperative AI
• AI for Science & Epistemics
• AI for Longevity Biotechnology
• AI for Molecular Nanotechnology
• AI for Neuro, Brain-Computer Interfaces & Whole Brain Emulation

A large share of future scientific progress will be driven by AI. Most of that work happens inside closed academic or commercial containers: the labs building frontier models crowd out compute access for open science, and research agendas are shaped by what legacy academic institutions or shorter-sighted commercial funders will back. That structure is poorly suited to the applications that matter most for civilizational progress, which deserve an independent container where a molecular biologist, a cryptographer, and an AI researcher can work together, powered by local compute and funding to design the tooling that scales impact across the sciences. The AI Node is where the required AI tooling gets built, talent gets upskilled, and progress gets translated and incubated into a thriving R&D community.

By funding our AI Nodes, you support a future in which AI progress is developed openly in pursuit of freedom and flourishing.

Since August 2023, our Foresight AI Safety Grants have awarded between $2M – $5M per year across projects that could make a significant difference for AI safety within short timelines.  We focus on early, neglected, and high-upside research that legacy funders overlook. Grants range from $10,000 to $100,000, and can support work  within:

• Secure AI: Secure, sovereign, and private AI — advancing cooperation across humans and AIs
• Longevity Biotechnology: Reversing aging and extending healthspan through frontier biotech, biostasis, and replacement
• Neurotechnology: Brain-computer interfaces, whole brain emulation, and neuro-inspired AI safety
• Nanotechnology: Molecular machines and atomic precision manufacturing for energy, medicine, and space
• Space: Advancing progress from near-term applications to long-term exploration

Our grants are designed to get funding into the hands of ambitious researchers quickly, before an idea has proven itself to legacy institutions – because that’s exactly the stage where Foresight has always been willing to bet early.

Recent grantees include:

• Herbie Bradley, University of Cambridge: The Great Refactor FRO — C/C++ Translation to Rust at Scale
• Dawn Song, UC Berkeley: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World Vulnerability Reproduction
• Ed Boyden (MIT) and Konrad Kording (University of Pennsylvania): The complete neuronal input-output functions project, to simulate a first complete brain in C. elegans

By supporting our general grants fund, you help us back the next generation of frontier research across every field we work in.

The Foresight Fellowship is a one-year program for outstanding talent. With a 6% acceptance rate, it is among the most selective programs in its field, a reflection of its impact and reputation. While the current program delivers strong support, many Fellows report that early project funding remains their biggest bottleneck. Since 2017, our Foresight Fellowship has supported a total of 272 fellows with match-making with possible funders and mentors, career counseling, travel-paid speaking invitations to relevant conferences, visa support through J-1 visas, and tailored support.

We are fundraising to be able to provide Fellows with project stipends. The fund endowment would give them the freedom to move quicker from idea to experimentation, prototyping, and first builds. By supporting the Fellowship, you directly empower the next generation of innovators shaping our shared future.

Fellow alumni include:

• Jeff Ladish: Executive Director of Palisade Research, previously built Anthropic’s information-security program; studies offensive AI capabilities and the risk of humanity permanently losing control of AI systems.
• Lisa Thiergart: got a US visa and structural support, now leads the Security Level 5 (SL5) Task Force at the Institute for Security and Technology, coordinating 50+ participants, including AI lab decision-makers, national security leaders, and chip providers, on standards for securing AI infrastructure against nation-state threats.
• Fin Moorhouse:Research Fellow at Forethought; co-authored Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion (with Will MacAskill), which directly analyzes “power-concentrating mechanisms” from advanced AI and how to reduce human concentration-of-power risk.
• Scott Emmons:AI safety research scientist at Anthropic (prev. Google DeepMind); PhD at UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI under Stuart Russell; co-founder of FAR.AI; researches how AI systems can deceive or manipulate human oversight.
• Nora Ammann:Program Director at the UK’s ARIA, running the Safeguarded AI program and co-founder of PIBBSS; works on AI alignment and governance grounded in complex-systems and political-philosophy approaches to keeping AI safe and accountable.
• Morgan Livingston: AI and national-security policy researcher, TechCongress alum who supported federal/White House AI policy; writes on how AI security narratives entrench existing power dynamics and the private sector’s outsized role as a security actor.
• Lewis Hammond:Co-director of the Cooperative AI Foundation and an Oxford DPhil researcher; works on safety and cooperation in multi-agent AI systems, and contributed to the International AI Safety Report.
• Ben Garfinkel:Director of the Centre for the Governance of AI; researches AI governance, the security implications of AI, and the causes of war.
• Joshua Tan:Co-founder and research director of Metagov; building digital-democracy and deliberation infrastructure so AI isn’t dominated by any single platform.

Foresight runs three types of prizes: fast bets on unproven builders, cultural work on positive futures, and recognition for established scientific contributions.

• Event Prize: Project Pitch — $10,000 per event, five events a year. A builder pitches at each event, the community judges, and $10,000 goes to the winning idea. $50,000 funds a full year: five events, five winning projects.
• Meme Prize — $10,000 award pool. The Existential Hope Meme Prize funds creators who compress positive, technologically grounded futures into memes, videos, and shareable media. The inaugural 2025 edition drew nearly 400 submissions and judges including Steven Pinker, Liv Boeree, and Jason Crawford; support keeps it running annually.
• Awards: Feynman Prize (nanotechnology) & Norm Hardy Prize (usable security) — our longest-running prizes recognize work already advancing its field. Two past Feynman Prize winners, David Baker (2004) and Sir Fraser Stoddart (2007), later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 2024 and 2016.

The Vision Weekend conferences are our flagship events. They gather leading researchers, builders, and funders to explore cutting-edge science and tech, and enjoy immersive social and cultural experiences like cypherpunk evenings, art installations, and lab tours. These events have a strong track record of matching researchers for collaborations, early-stage entrepreneurs with their first investors, and startups with early employees. By supporting our Vision Weekends, you help catalyze new collaborations in frontier science and tech, and subsidize attendance for exceptional emerging talent who otherwise wouldn’t be able to join.

Become a sponsor

We have three Vision Weekends available for sponsorship:

• Puerto Rico (February 2026)
• United Kingdom (June 2026)
• USA (December 2026)

As a sponsor, you gain visibility and access to VIP events with world-class scientists and technologists, and the opportunity to co-create the Vision Weekend program with us. For questions, reach out to [email protected].

Foresight Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (Tax ID: 77-0119168), so your gift is tax-deductible in the US as allowed by law, less the value of any premiums of significant value received, in this case, 20% of the total cost for your ticket.

Our technical workshops gather carefully curated groups of leading researchers, builders, and funders to solve the bottlenecks at the frontiers of science and technology. By supporting the workshops, you enable an important forum for leading experts to collaborate on the most pressing bottlenecks in AI for science and safety. You also subsidize attendance for exceptional emerging talent who otherwise wouldn’t be able to join. Additionally, you contribute to the prize we award at the workshop – funding for the most promising project the participants come up with to advance the field.

• 2026 AI for Frontier & Meta Science (San Francisco, September 28–30 2026): a select gathering of ~60 researchers, engineers, and funders at the frontier of AI-first science, across neuro/BCIs, longevity & molecular nano, energy & climate and scientific infrastructure. Participants include Ben Reinhardt (Speculative Technologies), Martin Borch Jensen (Gordian Bio), Mikhail Shapiro (Merge Labs), Tom Oxley (Synchron), Vivek Natarajan (Google DeepMind), Sam Rodriques (Future House), Becca Carlson (Deliverome) and many others.
• 2026 Supercooperation: The Future of AI for Democracy (Seoul, July 2026), co-hosted with the Cooperative AI Foundation. 50 participants from the UK AI Security Institute, RAND/Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, Collective Intelligence Project, DemocracyNext, South Korea’s Presidential Council on National AI Strategy, Google DeepMind, Meta, Stanford, MIT, ETH Zurich, and Cambridge.
• 2026 Secure & Sovereign AI Workshop (Berlin, July 2026), bringing together researchers on AI security and distributed/sovereign AI infrastructure. Speakers included David Dao (Protocol Labs), Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation), and Mateo Petel (Google DeepMind), among many others.
• Anything from 2025? 
• 2024 – hosting 3 Workshops: Foresight ran three workshops in San Francisco on secure and beneficial AI: a Secure Multipolar AI Workshop on peaceful power-sharing in AGI scenarios, a Neuro for Safe AI Workshop on AGI and whole-brain-emulation timelines and risk, and an AI Institution Design Hackathon on the governance structures needed to sustain democracy under strong AI. Speakers and participants came from Anthropic, DeepMind, Palisade Research, the Future of Humanity Institute, Stanford Medicine, the Future of Life Institute, Schmidt Futures, and the US Department of Homeland Security.Anything from 2023? 

Become a sponsor

As a sponsor, you gain exposure to top-tier talent through branding and access to these highly curated events, along with the opportunity to give a presentation. For questions, reach out to [email protected].

Foresight Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (Tax ID: 77-0119168), so your gift is tax-deductible in the US as allowed by law, less the value of any premiums of significant value received, in this case, 20% of the total cost for your ticket.

Our weekly seminars bring together leading researchers and builders online to explore the frontiers of biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, space, and AI. The seminars:

• Expand access to knowledge about the latest breakthroughs across fields
• Connect emerging projects with collaborators and streamline the talent pipeline
• Strengthen early-stage research ecosystems by creating mission-aligned communities

Since 2020, we have hosted small and pointy seminars to welcome our community to take part of first-hand science  The recordings are reaching 100,000+ YouTube views, the seminars have become a hub for ambitious STEM communities, ensuring open access to cutting-edge science and technology.

By supporting our seminars, you can help remove key bottlenecks in early science and technology R&D. Funding directly covers the coordination, speaker outreach, and production costs that make the seminars possible.