Holden Karnofsky

Director of AI Strategy

Open Philanthropy

Areas of expertise: Corporate governance, Extinction risk scenarios, Standards and evaluations, US AI policy

Holden is the Director of AI Strategy at Open Philanthropy, a funder that gives away over $500 million per year and has been the largest philanthropic supporter of AI risk reduction work since 2016. Holden has spent his career trying to do as much good as possible by identifying and working on issues that are important, neglected and tractable. In 2007, he co-founded GiveWell, a charity evaluator focused on health and poverty reduction in lower-income countries. Several years later, he led a project within GiveWell that would eventually become Open Philanthropy, and served as Open Philanthropy’s CEO (and later co-CEO) from 2017-2023. He’s overseen Open Philanthropy’s work on causes including farm animal welfare, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and land use reform as well as AI. In The Most Important Century, Holden laid out his view that AI could make the 21st century the most important of all time for humanity. He has since shifted his role at Open Philanthropy to focus exclusively on the cause of reducing risks from advanced AI.

Selected Publications

Karnofsky, H. (2022). Cold Takes on AI. Cold Takes

The "most important century" blog post series. Cold Takes.