Safeguarding the future: 2023 Review

In 2023, nearly 900 donors supported our Giving Fund: Safeguarding the Future. Together, they donated approximately €750,000 from Germany and CHF 860,000 from Switzerland. Thank you very much for your generous support of the excellent and highly promising work being done by the organizations funded through the Future Fund!

Below is a brief summary of the year 2023, highlighting the progress and achievements of the organizations we have supported so far. This summary has been developed in collaboration with the organizations and our assessors and partners such as Longview Philanthropy and the Founders Pledge Global Catastrophic Risk Fund, who also assist us in selecting the projects to fund. Additional projects, including those focused on biosafety, are already in preparation.

• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the global risks arising from the war in Ukraine
• Center for a New American Security for a workshop on the risks of autonomous weapons systems
• Global Shield on policy measures to reduce global disaster risks overall
• METR (ex. ARC Evals) to evaluate state-of-the-art AI systems in order to identify and minimize risks

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The fulfillment of the mission of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace primarily depends on attracting and retaining the most talented scholars and experts in their respective fields. Since the summer of 2023, Carnegie’s work on Russia and the impact of the war in Ukraine has been significantly bolstered by the addition of three new senior fellows: Michael Kofman, Dara Massicot, and Alexandra Prokopenko.

Kofman and Massicot, based in Washington, D.C., are among the world’s leading experts on the Russian military and the war in Ukraine. Their insights are sought after by senior Western, European, and Ukrainian politicians and military officials. Kofman joined Carnegie from the Center for Naval Analyses, where he served as Director of the Russia Program. Prior to Carnegie, Massicot worked as a Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation and as a Senior Analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Alexandra Prokopenko, formerly a senior official at the Russian Central Bank, has joined the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. Her work on challenges facing the Russian economy and the impact of Western sanctions has garnered significant recognition in Western political circles.

The work of these scholars at Carnegie has been made possible by the generous support of Effektiv Spenden.

Program activities and outputs

Carnegie experts play a leading role in supporting policymakers and opinion leaders in dealing with the dangerous implications of almost complete rupture of relations with the Kremlin. They are known for speaking truth to power and providing strategic insights that are unparalleled. An example of this is a lengthy article by Andrew S. Weiss and Eugene Rumer, published in late November in the Wall Street Journal. Their article, urging the West to avoid “magical thinking” in developing a sustainable and effective political response to the challenge posed by a recalcitrant Russia, was personally praised by senior officials from the U.S and the EU, helping to spark a global debate about the dangers of an imminent end to the current confrontation. Meanwhile, Weiss and Rumer are jointly leading a project titled “Right-Sizing the Russia Challenge,” aimed at assisting senior U.S. officials across the political spectrum in addressing a range of key issues that will land on the new government’s desk in January 2025.

Similarly, Kofman and Massicot have conducted a comprehensive series of briefings for senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic about elements of a revised military strategy that could help Ukraine effectively “hold, build, and strike” in the coming year. Their work draws on experience gained from time spent at the front lines with Ukrainian commanders and troops, as well as frequent discussions with senior representatives in Kyiv. Led by Senior Fellow Eric Ciaramella, Carnegie’s Ukraine initiative focuses on longer-term issues such as reconstruction, security measures, and the ongoing impacts of the war on politics, society, and the economy. Joining the project team is former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.

The Berlin team has been very active in enhancing the West’s understanding of recent developments in Russia, including the death of Alexey Navalny and the Kremlin’s aggressive outreach to China. Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based Carnegie scholar, has garnered significant attention with his groundbreaking work on changing trends in Russian public opinion and their “learned indifference” to the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Kolesnikov’s research is conducted in collaboration with the director of the Levada Center , the only independent institute for public opinion research and sociology in Russia.

All of these projects were made possible by the generous support of Effektiv Spenden and other donors.

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Center for a New American Security

Back in February 2023, the donation fund financed an expert workshop by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) on the risks of autonomous weapons systems. The donations from the fund supplemented an existing grant to the CNAS from the Founders Pledge GCR Fund. Christian Ruhl, Senior Researcher and Fund Manager of the GCR Fund at Founders Pledge, took part in the workshop himself and reported on it in detail in a guest post on our blog.

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Global Shield

Global Shield was founded shortly before receiving support from the Giving Fund in June 2023. It is an international organization dedicated to reducing global catastrophic risks (GCR) across all areas. Global Shield advocates for a world where all governments take decisive action to reduce and, if possible, eliminate GCR, regardless of the threat causing the risk.

Since its foundation Global Shield made significant progress in four key areas: applied policy research, direct political lobbying of governments, public relations and communications aimed at policy makers, and internal operations and growth.

1. Global Shield has developed a model approach for the development of practical policy measures to reduce GCR in all sectors. An important outcome of this work is an initial list of approximately 150 ideas for relevant policy measures that are transferable to different countries.
2. Global Shield continued its successful lobbying efforts in the US to reduce global catastrophic risks. In particular, this has contributed to the US government becoming the first nation to officially recognize the broad range of catastrophic and existential threats to the world, including artificial intelligence, in a forthcoming report.
3. Global Shield has successfully made its website, social media and a regular newsletter on GCR policy available to a growing audience to increase awareness of the organization.
4. After all, Global Shield has moved beyond the initial “start-up” phase by developing important internal strategies, guidelines and tools to prepare for future growth.

In 2024, Global Shield carry out a series of projects in the same four core areas. Planned projects include:

• As part of its applied policy research, it published, among other things, a report on the impact of competition and rivalry between the US and its Western allies and China on GCR, as well as a library of policy proposals that Global Shield options will offer options for various political opportunities.
• Advocate for new laws and policies to improve the continuity of U.S. Cold War-era government and operational planning to adapt to the spectrum of 21st century global catastrophic risks beyond nuclear war.
• Advocacy for the inclusion of global catastrophic risks in the Common Agenda and the United Nations’ Summit of the Future, particularly in the planned Global Risk Report, alongside established partnerships with like-minded organizations such as The Elders.
• Op-Eds to be published in key media and increased use of social media to increase external branding and awareness of Global Shield, as well as continuous improvement of the regular newsletter and website.
• Finally, the search has already begun for the most effective locations for potential offices capable of conducting customized campaigns on global disaster risks with the governments of their host countries.

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METR (formerly ARC Evals)

In August 2023, the Giving Fund: Safeguarding the Future supported the evaluation project of the Alignment Research Center (ARC Evals). The project has already achieved significant successes, such as:

• The team at ARC Evals has conducted independent evaluations of GPT-4 (in collaboration with OpenAI) and Claude (in collaboration with Anthropic).
• The project is now an official partner of the British Frontier AI Taskforce.
• The ideas developed by the organization were presented in the US Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (“Regulation on the safe and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence”).
• The work of the organization was also highlighted by the former President of the USA, Barack Obama.

ARC was originally founded as a small alignment theory organization under the leadership of Paul Christiano. In 2022, she hired Beth Barnes and founded ARC Evals, to investigate independent evaluations of state-of-the-art AI models as an approach.

Since ARC Evals has now become an independent team and the majority of the ARC-employees, the organization has decided, ARC Evals as an independent non-profit organization. In doing so, the organization has also adopted a new name that reflects the focus of its work: METR stands for “Model Evaluation & Threat Research” and is a reference to metrology - the science of measurement and its application.

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