Intro and tl;dr

I'm Esa Koskinen, working as a volunteer director of AI Safety Tokyo.

Epistemic status: estimates by an interested party; I run one of the organizations discussed. The model behind the numbers is public, and I'll edit corrections into the post.

Lately I've spent ~120 hours investigating financial information and grant applications made by AI safety organizations and independent researchers in Japan. I was somewhat disappointed by the results, and wanted to share a summary of my findings with the rest of the world.

I estimate that Japan has a pretty urgent funding gap of ~2.1 million USD, could employ AI safety researchers about 1.8-2.3x cheaper than the US, and in general has many neglected opportunities for impact. (Source spreadsheet.)

In 2027, I expect Japanese AI safety organizations could hire ~35 researchers and ~10 staff members with good marginal effectiveness. However, despite lots of interest and demand, the organizations don't have enough funding to make it happen.

If you want to help out, please leave a comment, share this post with your friends, or drop me a line personally at [email protected].

Overview of AI safety in Japan

I don't expect LW readers to be familiar with AI safety in Japan and the situation has changed recently, so a quick overview might be useful.

AI safety gatherings in Japan started in 2018, but became much more regular and structured after AI Safety Tokyo was established in Jan 2023. Since then, multiple organizations have spun up for doing education, governance, and research.

The current challenges contain a common theme: Japanese AI safety organizations tend to lack funding. Most groups are run by volunteers, many of which would love to work on AI safety full-time. However, having to run on volunteers leads to constant strain from operational bottlenecks, and most orgs have to discard promising opportunities due to lack of time.

Despite this, Japan has had ~80 AI safety related events in the past year, ran the ARENA curriculum, and brought many new people into the field. We have also run annual international conferences since 2023:

• 2023: Japan Alignment Conference (JAC) hosted by Conjecture and Araya
• 2024–2025: Technical AI Safety conference (TAIS) hosted by AI Safety Tokyo
• 2026: TAIS hosted by Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative and Noeon Research

The 2026 relocation cuts both ways: the conference born in Tokyo was good enough that Noeon Research was able to pitch it in Oxford, and Tokyo didn’t have the funded ecosystem to keep it. That is one of the failure modes this post is about.

Biggest opportunities in Japan

At the moment, the community is facing four main bottlenecks, each of which is a neglected opportunity for impact:

1. Funding: During the past two years, we in Japan have put significant effort into creating a pipeline for scaling up the field and getting people to do more useful research in it. However, we don't have the funding to pay salaries, restricting work to only what can be done in one's spare time, as a volunteer.

The obvious answer would be for people to apply for more grants. The reasons why this is not happening and what could be done about it are elaborated in the following sections.

2. Retention: Many people come to Japan from overseas, do independent AI safety research for 6 months, realize they can't get funding, and leave the field. My personal contacts include about a dozen such people. I've had discussions with roughly a third of the AI safety community here, so I expect the real number to be 2-4x higher.

This can be super damaging: some of these people have done MATS/ARENA, taken part in a fellowship, or completed other high-quality programs like SPAR or TARA. The loss of their talent and knowledge presents a huge sunk cost, as well as a wasted opportunity. It's also demotivating for the rest of the community.

Japan as a country has a lot of appeal, and I think we could plausibly become Asia's largest AI safety hub. I've spoken to dozens of people in the field who would prefer to live and work here instead of the US or London, if only the pathway for being funded was clearer and more realistic.

3. Awareness: For politicians and the general public, AI risks - especially existential ones - are almost unheard of. Japanese politicians are under-educated on AI, and rarely push back on issues regarding it. Many decision-makers have a willingness to learn more, but don't have enough Japanese-language material to do so.

In general, Japanese culture tends to value safety and cautious use of technology, despite also being techno-optimistic and interested in machine consciousness. I think the tension between these facets could be resolved in favor of AI safety with relatively small effort compared to most Western countries.

4. Japan AISI: They have a massive $56M budget, yet struggle with enabling talented people make good use of it. As a result, nobody outside their industry partners can leverage the budget. The reasons are complex, so I wrote a separate section on this.

Why are people not getting funded?

When asked why people's grant applications fall through or what prevents them from applying in the first place, we've heard a variety of reasons. The five most common, in order of prominence:

• Too time-consuming: finally getting a grant from a Western source might take a total of 50-200 hours of effort. For an independent researcher, fragmenting their work for many months at a time can be too cumbersome.
• Odds appear too low: the prospect of having to do 10+ applications to find out if anyone is interested is too daunting, so people don't apply in the first place. This is reinforced by prior disappointments of grant-seekers in the community.
• Lack of familiarity with funding opportunities: many only know of Coefficient Giving and LTFF. Some don't even know that foreign funding exists in the first place, sometimes due to lack of knowledge but also due to cultural or language barriers.
• Research or action plan is not refined or clear enough: this can sometimes be the case for people transitioning from a volunteer to a full-time role, when they still have many unknowns and not enough time to investigate.
• Structural jurisdiction blockers: some individuals cannot lawfully or practically receive foreign grant money at all, for visa, tax, or banking reasons, and there has been no Japanese entity to intermediate.

In past years, most successful research grants have only covered expenses for 6-12 months at a time. Some independent researchers have concluded that the lack of job security feels too harsh, when compared to working at traditional companies or well-paid startups.

This year, people close to me have submitted about 20-25 grant applications, and only tiny ones for event venue fees have come through.

As a result, people end up working as part-time volunteers, burning through personal financial runway, or leaving the field. None of which seem ideal for growing a vibrant and productive community.

What's the plan?

Establishing an NPO for regranting could be an effective solution. Here's why:

• Time savings: instead of each organization and individual spending a whole lot of time applying for every grant separately, we could reduce the time spent by having a single entity that can do foreign grant applications on the community's behalf.
  • For example, if 20 people each made five different applications, the total number of applications would be 100. However, if each person makes a single application for a regranting fund, and the fund makes five applications on behalf of the community, the total number of applications would be 25. (That is, $n+m$ total applications instead of $n\ast m$.)
  • Foreign funders also benefit: in this example each would receive a single high-quality application, instead of 20 made by individuals who are already bottlenecked on time.
• Familiarity: grant applications from Japan could be much more easily reviewed by a local entity that already knows the orgs, their goals, and how focused they are on AI safety. We could also incentivize people to make better theories of change regarding AI safety, and provide individual feedback more easily.
• Infrastructure: it could help coordinate projects that aim to build an environment where people can easily learn about AI safety, enter the field, and do useful research. This would also connect to work already underway to set up a physical hub in Tokyo.
• Retention: if the regranting org has extra funding, it could enable researchers coming from overseas to stay in the field, instead of losing them forever.

The idea would be to get enough funding to pay the current would-be-employees of Japanese orgs in 2027, then build a buffer that can be used to guarantee job security and enable further growth.

We already have people doing the paperwork for setting all of this up. The next step would be to actually secure funding commitments to cover the funding gap ($2.1M). I think the most realistic pathways for this fall into two buckets:

• Inform foreign funders about this problem, so that Japan is on the map when funding becomes less scarce (e.g. after the rumored Anthropic IPO).
• Find a way to get funding from the Japan AISI: they have an overabundant budget, and groups focusing on x-risk are receiving none of it.

The first approach is, to the best of my ability, addressed by this post. The second has been attempted without success; see the next section for more details.

What's up with Japan AISI?

A common question that comes up: Japan AISI has $56M of funding yet the other organizations have almost zero. What's up with that?

The answer, as usual, is that things are more complex than they seem.

• Japan AISI's mandates come from the IPA, which is under the ministry of trade (METI), which is steered by the cabinet office's AI Strategy Headquarters. However, the politicians at the top are rather uninformed on AI. Essentially the Japan AISI's hands are tied, as the METI and IPA's goal is to figure out how to create an environment that facilitates further investment into AI capabilities development.
• Many of Japan AISI's leaders continue to work as executives in large tech companies. This is common in Japan's governmental organizations, but results in the leadership having limited bandwidth for running the organization effectively. There is also a potential conflict of incentives, as their primary affiliation is with their employer instead of Japan AISI.
• Japan AISI has significant overhead for making payments or establishing partnerships, due to their public commitment and reporting requirements. This naturally biases them away from smaller grants or contracts.
• Much of Japan AISI's staff is hired through traditional government channels. This leads to many of them being mostly uninformed and uninterested in AI safety.
• Even when actually talented people have joined, they have faced various bureaucratic challenges in getting useful things done.

Given all of this, it's no wonder Japan AISI's primary activities fall under:

• Hosting international discussions and facilitating AI safety framework development.
• Creating frameworks and documentation for standards and best practices.
• Collecting and summarizing information on AI safety news.
• Doing limited amounts of research and model evaluations.
• Communications between the government and industry.

While these are generally a nice thing for someone to work on, none of them budge my models of AI safety outcomes by much.^[1]

Having talked to people at Japan AISI, as well as people who have good connections with them, it seems like it would be infeasible for them to fund the non-profit arm of Japan's AI safety community. Not only is the overhead a sticking point, many of their employees are overwhelmed with busywork and don't have time to focus on the bigger picture.

As such, I am pessimistic about our chances of getting funding through them. However, it is an avenue we are actively investigating, and could improve a lot if both sides had people with the necessary bandwidth. In the meantime, our collaboration is mostly limited to running events together.

Convincing Japan AISI or the cabinet office would take lots of effort and 1-on-1 networking. Nobody I know wants to do it as a volunteer, but we have people who would work on this if they were being paid.

Detailed breakdown and numbers

I made a detailed spreadsheet with the best known estimates for each organization's financials, number of potential employees, and funding gaps for 2026-2027. It was refined with multiple people who understand different areas of the community - big thank you to everyone who helped out! You can check it out here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EZBlPASzwtE3MvWeA9YxHTdCQkykk6LUANacDSLGBqs/edit?usp=sharing

In total, excluding Japan AISI, our estimates are:

• The effective funding gap in Japan is approximately $2.1M.^[2]
• Filling it could bring the number of employed FTEs in 2027 from 2.5 to 44.
• Beyond 2027, with more funding I expect the orgs could grow at least 25% / year.

If the $2.1M is not reached or we hit some unexpected costs, I'd cut from the two research grants first. This is because we could address Japan's unique opportunities more effectively with a portfolio of approaches, than with a larger research bet that deprives other organizations of impact.

Our estimate for the bare minimum needed to resolve all operational bottlenecks is $426k. However, I expect that we would probably proceed with a different plan if only the minimum is reached, for three reasons:

• It would be a negative signal regarding future funding beyond 2027. We might conclude that this approach would have a low chance of long-term success.
• Despite the bottlenecks being top priority, the marginal effectiveness of the $426k scenario is expected to be lower than in the $2.1M scenario.^[3]
• The overhead costs of setting up the regranting org and managing grant applications are relatively fixed. In the $2.1M scenario they would be less than 2% of the total amount, but in the $426k scenario they would be closer to 6%.

The current plan seems to be most effective in the $1.5-3.2M funding range for 2027.

Salary comparison

The average salary of a mid-career researcher in Japan is around 6.5M yen, or $40k per year. The average overhead of employment (taxes, insurances, accounting, etc.) is close to 50% on top of that, bringing the total cost of employment to $60k / person.

Browsing the jobs at 80,000 Hours and elsewhere, it seems like the current range for entry-level research positions is around $80-110k. Even for this lower-end range, the base salaries are 2.0-2.8x higher.

However, employer overhead is lower in the US, averaging at 30%. Thus the total cost of employment is $105-140k, or at least 1.8-2.3x higher than in Japan.

Beyond that, living costs in Japan tend to be much cheaper than in the US or UK, enabling a pleasant lifestyle despite the lower salary.

Want to help?

All in all, $2.1M doesn't seem like a big sum for enabling ~10 orgs to go from perpetual operational bottlenecks to doing their best work. I expect we could improve Japan's impact by at least an order of magnitude with it, while growing the field by 40 professionals or more.

If you're a funder or someone who could connect us with one, please share this post with relevant friends or drop me a line at [email protected]. I'd be excited to resolve the situation and help put Japan on the map!

The yen is cheap, and our people dedicated. Let's make the most out of it.