Following up on Regranting in 2026, here are some people we’d be excited to have as regrantors!
Good regrantors have at least one, and preferably more than one, of taste, dealflow, and hustle. We’ve divided them into rough categories with a bit of explanation, though many of these people could fall into a few different categories. If we raise $2m for regranting, we’d love to give each of these people a $50k pot.
To be clear, this is not a list of people who’ve agreed to be regrantors! Many have said yes, but for many, we don’t know yet whether they’d be interested.
Regrantors list
Previous Manifund regrantors
This is the most obvious category: people who have been Manifund regrantors in the past and made grants that looked good.
- Joel Becker: Now working at Anthropic, Joel has been an enthusiastic and prescient regrantor every year of the program. He’s very proactive in creating opportunities and following up with recipients, and he made some great early grants to ChinaTalk and (what became) Eleos AI.
- Marcus Abramovitch: Formerly a hedge fund manager, now a statistician at Mechanize. He has an impressive amount of hustle as a regrantor and made good early grants to Timaeus, Joseph Bloom, and Apollo Research.
- Ryan Kidd: CEO of MATS; he’s made regrants to Timaeus, AI 2027, and IAPS.
- Gavin Leech: Partner at Arb Research and former producer of the Dwarkesh Podcast; he’s granted money to PIBBSS, Apart Research, and many small, speculative projects.
- Dan Hendrycks: Director of CAIS. At Manifund, he made regrants that led to the WMDP benchmark and the AI Frontiers substack.
- Thomas Larsen: Researcher at the AI Futures Project; he’s made regrants to AI Digest and multiple speculative research projects.
- Adam Gleave: CEO of FAR.AI; he made regrants for career transition funding and travel expenses for promising young researchers.
- Rachel Weinberg: Senior program manager at Constellation, founder of The Curve, and early regrantor to Timaeus. (Also, founding engineer at Manifund and married to Austin.)
To be clear, we’re happy with every one of our past regrantors — possibly excepting Qualy the Lightbulb — and would love to have them back, if they so chose.
Others with good track records
In general, we’re super excited about creating more of a feedback loop between “has made good calls in the past” and “has more money to make grants with now.”
- Linchuan Zhang: Currently a visiting scholar at Forethought and former fund manager at LTFF. We might be biased, but we like his early grant to Manifold Markets.
- Misha Yagudin: Cofounder of Samotsvety, Arb Research, Sage, and Olo Din.
- Sydney von Arx: Until recently a member of technical staff at METR.
- Matt Putz: Now human data lead at METR, previously founded Arena and a grantmaker at Coefficient Giving who funded things like a “shallow overview of AI safety” post.
Lab employees
Lab employees have a ton of context and expertise that those outside generally don’t. This category, along with the category below of “investors,” is a bit confusing, because these people might be reasonably expected to have made enough money from their careers that Manifund doesn’t need to be giving them more. However, we’re interested in piloting a program where they can partly fund their own regranting.
- Neel Nanda: Leads mechanistic interpretability at Google DeepMind. He’s also been a great regrantor for Manifold, getting to know early-career researchers through his mentoring and using his connections to find grants.
- Evan Hubinger: Alignment stress-testing team lead at Anthropic; he’s made great early grants at Manifund to Timaeus and Apollo, among others.
- Ethan Perez: Alignment team lead at Anthropic, and both a grantee and regrantor at Manifund.
- Tristan Hume: Performance optimization team lead at Anthropic and an early regrantor at Manifund.
- Avital Balwit: Chief of staff at Anthropic.
- Catherine Olsson: Member of technical staff at Anthropic.
Investors
The skill set of good investors has a lot of overlap with the skills of a grantmaker. We’re excited about having people in the pool who can apply more of an “investing mindset.”
- Leopold Aschenbrenner: Founder of Situational Awareness; also a past Manifund regrantor.
- Ivan Bercovich: Partner at ScOp Venture Capital and the first investor in Pangram.
Founders & successful grantees
This category can be tricky, because they’re often quite busy. But founders of successful organizations often have good instincts about what makes a good founder, and networks rich in promising people. These five all got early funding from Manifund, and we think it’s good to have a Manifund network that expands in this way.
- Jesse Hoogland: Executive director of Timaeus, now cofounder of Resolution.
- Rob Long: Director of Eleos AI, investigating AI consciousness and AI welfare.
- Jordan Schneider: Founder of ChinaTalk.
- Joseph Bloom: Model transparency lead at AISI.
Policy and advocacy
A lot of our past regrants have been more focused on technical AI safety, but we’d love to broaden that more to people thinking about policy and advocacy.
- Oscar Delaney: Formerly a strategy researcher at IAPS, now he does AI policy grantmaking at Macroscopic and writes about AI strategy and funding at AGI Strategy.
- Nathan Calvin: General counsel at Encode, he’s helped enact state-level AI safety legislation.
- Michael Trazzi: Formerly a filmmaker who produced the SB1047 documentary, now organizing protests such as Stop the AI Race.
- Renan Araujo: Director of programs at IAPS, previously at Rethink Priorities and Manifund regrantor.
- Dave Kasten: Policy at Palisade.
People with interesting networks
Our list could use more of this, but one thing we want is people who diversify our network to different fields, countries, organizations, or age groups.
- Noah Birnbaum: A college student on leave to work at Constellation. We think affecting the career trajectory of promising young people is one of the best things regranting can do.
Take-havers
We’re also excited about giving regranting pots to anyone else with good and unique takes on AI.
- Oliver Habryka: Founder of LessWrong, Lighthaven, and Lightcone Commons.
- Richard Ngo: An independent researcher and influential thinker on AI. He’s also a Manifund regrantor and writes at Mind the Future.
- Dmitrii Volkov: Previously research lead at Palisade Research, now thinking about RSI.
- Janus: An AI whisperer at Anima Labs, well-known for thinking on digital minds and AI welfare.
We’re also generally interested in adding more investors, people with diverse networks, people in AI welfare/rights, and people in forecasting to the list.
Is it disqualifying if a regrantor …
… is busy?
Regranting takes some time. Ideally, a regrantor has the bandwidth (say at least 5 hours a month) to network with people, research grants, follow up with grantees, and provide ongoing support. But we think even quite busy people can be great regrantors, especially if their day job leads to them coming across good opportunities.
… has other funds to make grants with?
Not necessarily. Even professional grantmakers can come across grants that they aren’t able to make through their day job, whether it’s because they’re too small, too weird, off-topic, or for any other reason. For this reason, we’re excited to invite grantmakers from orgs like cG, Longview, and Macroscopic to participate this time around.
We did err on the side of listing people we think are less likely to have other good ways to make grants; for instance, there isn’t a ton of overlap between our list and the Lightcone Commons evaluator list. (We still expect some overlap to be reasonable, as regranting budgets offer more discretion and autonomy.)
… is contrarian or controversial?
We don’t think it should be. Part of the thesis of regranting is that it’s good to have funding decisions less centralized, to promote an intellectually diverse ecosystem.
