I think the discussion about how we should think about working with governments is very important. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Nick!

Congratulations on creating this! It feels like quite a natural progression. Will you share the curriculum's details publicly when the paint is dry?

I'm excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it's great that it's happening.

My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):

• I think that these kinds of projects risk distracting donors because of the double appeal of impact + returns on investment.
  • I think cultivated meat and alternative proteins did this for the last decade, and a lot of money that might otherwise have been more effectively deployed was invested in unpromising companies and on an unpromising theory of change (and I think I am on record saying this at the time so am not just trying to claim retrospective credit!).
  • I think this was doubly true because if these companies were especially promising, they would (and did, at first) attract non-counterfactually valuable funding (e.g. non-EA venture capital, etc). I'd be very excited about welfare tech funded by non-EA money, and am moderately less excited about it when funded by EAs (though given that there is plausibly more funding coming online than can be spent effectively, this is less of an issue).
• Jevons paradox just does seem challenging for this work — I think there are probably many technologies where it will be less relevant, but it seems plausible that most things impacting pre-slaughter mortality on farms will face it enough that it could be a significant concern for many interventions. Unfortunately, these might often be the best targets for welfare tech on fisheries and farms. I'm much more excited about slaughter-focused welfare tech for this reason, and am excited projects in this space are on your radar. But, slaughter tech seems less ripe for for-profits because there is less reason for producers to pay for it.
• Animal welfare science is advancing at a pace far behind what we might need to make lots of welfare improvements. E.g. shrimp stunning evidence is incredibly thin, and the best, most recent evidence suggests that correct implementation really matters for whether or not we're stunning or just electrocuting shrimp. I worry that accelerating tech before the science is settled in many cases risks just cementing further bad practices, and we'll realize it too late. The companies being for-profits, because they can't be reined in by funders if they are making a mistake, could make this worse (and I'm not sure of ways to design for-profits with strong mission-lock, outside of having their ownership run through a non-profit (which sometimes fails), and benefit corporations don't really seem to work).
• The best examples we have of welfare tech so far (shrimp stunning and in-ovo sexing) seem like they were driven by advocacy (or direct delivery), not for-profits. E.g. shrimp stunner deployment seems mostly driven via SWP just buying them for farms and then ICAW, etc. getting corporate commitments, not farms buying them themselves (even if later advocacy pressure started shifting that). Similarly, it seems like retailer commitments and policy were the initial major drivers in getting in-ovo sexing off the ground. I could imagine much of this work will be most effective when paired with appropriate advocacy to advance it.

Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!

Hi Eitan. Thanks for sharing. I am enthusiastic about this initiative.

Its impact is more direct — same animals, better lives. Many animal-welfare interventions can be contested based on their indirect or secondary effects, such as how a diet shift ripples through wild-animal populations, say, or whether a reform just moves production elsewhere. Welfare Tech is comparatively straightforward: it improves the lives of animals already being farmed anyway.

I think interventions improving the lives of farmed animals may increase or decrease the welfare of soil invertebrates much more than they increase the welfare of farmed animals.

I see no escape from the uncertainty about the effects on soil invertebrates if one wants to increase welfare while accounting for all animals. I am not aware of any intervention supported by impact-focussed funders with effects on soil invertebrates robustly smaller than those on the target beneficiaries. Not saving human lives, not decreasing the consumption of animal foods or ingredients, not replacing fast with slower growth chicken, not replacing layers in battery cages with ones in cage-free aviaries or barns, not replacing standard with bird-safe glass, not replacing rodenticide with fertility control bait, and not even electrically stunning farmed shrimps.

It’s cost-effective, and the economics compound. Take shrimp stunners, estimated to help on the order of 1,400–1,500 shrimp per dollar per year.⁵ On a welfare-adjusted basis, some analyses (admittedly controversial) found it arguably ~100× more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns, which are estimated at 9–120 chicken-years per dollar. Those multiples lean on moral-weight assumptions for shrimp and pain during death; but even discounted, they’re remarkable.

5. Vasco Grilo, “Cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative,” EA Forum, 6 Oct 2024: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EbQysXxofbSqkbAiT; and the 2025 ACE review of SWP. The ≈100× multiple relies on Rethink Priorities’ median shrimp welfare range (~3% of a human’s).

It would be better to argue for high cost-effectiveness comparing interventions targeting similar species (with one intervention involving welfare tech)? Otherwise, the results of the comparisons will be influenced a lot by the uncertainty in welfare comparisons across species. I estimated the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has increased the welfare of shrimps 139 times as cost-effectively as cage-free egg corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens. However, for sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable, I calculate that HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps 2.26*10^-4 to 1.49 k times as cost-effectively as cage-free egg corporate campaigns. In other words, I have practically no idea about which interventions increases the welfare of their target beneficiries more cost-effectively. Below is a graph with the results for "exponent" from 0 to 2.

I am excited to hear this! I worked at Mercy for Animals when Milo was still there. I want to say that he is a true visionary and doer!

Re: The appendix on assurance contract. 

Whether the threshold is met in each case depends on the number of other signatories. Let’s call the number of other signatories XX, where X∼Binomial(N−1,p)X∼Binomial(N−1,p). Then:

Pr(X≥qN−1)∗(mqN−1)=Pr(X≥qN)∗(mqN)Pr(X≥qN−1)∗(mqN−1)=Pr(X≥qN)∗(mqN)

Or, equivalently: Pr[X=qN−1]∗(mqN−1)=Pr[X≥qN]Pr[X=qN−1]∗(mqN−1)=Pr[X≥qN]

There’s not a general closed form for pp, so we used numerical methods to find values for pp and the probability that the threshold number of signatories is reached given different values for NN and mm.

You solved for the solution of your equation numerically, but I think a decent analytical proxy would probably be that the good gets funded if m*sqrt(N)>1.

The analytical intuition is:

• The standard deviation of the sum of N independent events grows as sqrt(N).
• The probability of causing the good to go from unfunded to funded is proportional to the standard deviation (if the distribution is centered around the threshold, which it will be when the probability of getting funded is 50%, ie when the good goes from probably unfunded to probably funded).
• The gains are proportional to N and m, so the expected gains are proportional to m*N/sqrt(N)=m*sqrt(N)
• The value of funding your selfish good is constant at 1.
• So the good gets funded if m*sqrt(N)>1.

And it seems to roughly match the graph.