I was surprised to see that you are US tax deductible (via every) but not UK tax deductible, given that you are a uk-based charity. I assume this is downstream of different levels of non-profit bureaucracy in the different countries? I would recommend explicitly flagging this early in the post as this is a deal breaking factor for many medium sized donors and if this was a constraint for me, I would have filtered exactly incorrectly
EDIT 1st Dec 2025: I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.
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Great nudge, thanks Neel! I've updated the post and webpages to make this clearer now.
Extra notes:
For background: yep, Aleks is correct. We're a not-for-profit company in the UK, but not a UK charity, and as such can't claim Gift Aid on direct UK donations. We do have 501c3-equivalent status allowing US grantors to fund us easily, including Every.org, which collects tax-deductible donations from US individuals, and grants them on to us. And yes, this was a decision made in part because of administrative costs, though we're open to the possibility of becoming a UK charity later if it seems worthwhile.
I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.
it's not that surprising to me. getting Tax free donation status in the US is far easier than most other countries. OneDay Health Charity is registered in New Zealand in primarily with governance based there, and in Uganda as an international NGO, but it's only in the US that people can donate tax deductable through our 501c3 there.....
Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.
Are you happy to receive donations from AGI company employees?
Hi! We're keeping an eye on how big a portion of our funding comes from AGI company employees, but yes, we're very happy to receive such donations at the current margin, thanks.
(Responding in my capacity as Director of Ops at Forethought.)
Completely support this. Please consider making yourselves visible to ARIA if you haven't already https://link.aria.org.uk/cf-li (wrote up a post explaining in more detail if needed)
BOTEC
Back-of-the-envelope calculation?
Yep! We think our work doesn't lend itself easily to coming up with quantitative estimates of our expected impact.
Thanks for explaining. :)
I lead Forethought: we research how to navigate the transition to superintelligent AI, and then help people to address the issues we identify.
I think we might soon be funding constrained, in the sense that we’ll have more people that we’d like to hire than funding to hire them. (We’re currently in the middle of a hiring round. While we’re still evaluating candidates, we’ve been pleasantly pleased with our applicant pool, and we think that we might want to end up making offers to (or offering grants to) more people than we can currently fund.) If we end up in this situation, I think that marginal funding would (in expectation) lead to more good macrostrategy research.
You can see a bit more about the case for donating, budget, impact to date, and plans on our donate page and our 2025 fundraiser page. You can donate here.
Donations are tax-deductible for donors in the US, UK and the Netherlands. For more details on donation methods and tax-deductibility, see here.
Some quick FAQs:
Why haven’t other funders picked this up?
What sort of opportunity is this?
I’m happy to respond to questions in the comments!
Are you able to share why you've been endorsed by OP/Coefficient, to the point that they are recommending you to other donors, but they haven't been able to fill your funding gap via Good Ventures?
My understanding is that Coefficient remains excited about recommending us to donors, but recently confirmed with Good Ventures that we're not a good fit for Good Ventures' specific preferences at the moment.
I'm afraid that I can't speak to Good Ventures' reasons apart from noting that they evidently didn't change Coefficient's decision to recommend us to their other donors.
Seems reasonable, thanks! I feel generally more aligned with Coefficient/OP's judgement than Good Ventures', so seems fine by me