The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $1,337,600 over four years (from July 2017 to July 2021) to Stanford University to support research by Professor Percy Liang and three graduate students on artificial intelligence (AI) safety and alignment. Open Philanthropy previously made a $25,000 planning grant to Professor Liang in March 2017 to enable him to spend substantial time engaging with Open Philanthropy's process to determine whether to proceed with this larger award.
This grant falls within Open Philanthropy's work on potential risks from advanced AI, and is one of a number of grants it plans to make to support work by top AI researchers on AI safety and alignment issues, with the goals of a) building a pipeline for younger researchers, b) making progress on technical problems, and c) further establishing AI safety research as a field.