Over the past year, the industry has driven significant advances in ai capabilities. As those advances have accelerated, new academic research on ai safety is required. To address this gap, the Forum and its philanthropic partners are creating a new ai Safety Fund, which will support independent researchers around the world affiliated with academic institutions, research institutions and startups. The initial funding commitment for the ai Safety Fund comes from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, and the generosity of our philanthropic partners, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.(^footnote-1), Eric Schmidt and Jaan Tallinn. Altogether, this equates to more than $10 million in seed funding. We look forward to additional contributions from other partners.
Earlier this year, Forum members signed voluntary ai commitments at the White House, which included a commitment to facilitate third-party discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in our ai systems. The Forum sees the ai Safety Fund as an important part of delivering on this commitment by providing funding to the external community to evaluate and better understand border systems. The global debate on ai safety and the overall ai knowledge base will benefit from a broader range of voices and perspectives.
The primary objective of the Fund will be to support the development of new model and technique assessments for red team ai models to help develop and test assessment techniques for potentially dangerous capabilities of border systems. We believe that increased funding in this area will help raise safety and security standards and provide insight into the mitigations and controls that industry, governments and civil society need to respond to the challenges presented by ai systems.
The Fund will publish a call for proposals in the coming months. Meridian Institute will administer the Fund; Their work will be supported by an advisory committee made up of independent external experts, experts from ai companies, and people with grant-making experience.
