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The Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR) is a research organization whose mission is to reduce the risk of astronomical suffering from powerful AI, known as s-risks. Originally founded in July 2013 as the Foundational Research Institute (FRI), a project of the Swiss Effective Altruism Foundation, the organization adopted its current name in March 2020 and became an independent UK-registered charity at the end of 2021.
CLR's research agenda centers on understanding and mitigating worst-case risks from advanced AI systems, with a particular focus on conflict scenarios and the technical and philosophical aspects of cooperation. Key research areas include AI model personas and emergent misalignment, Safe Pareto Improvements for AI systems, acausal safety frameworks, and strategic readiness for interventions. CLR researchers have collaborated with researchers at CMU, Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Google DeepMind, and their work has generated follow-up research from OpenAI and Anthropic…
CLR's theory of change rests on the premise that as humanity develops more powerful technologies, particularly transformative AI, the consequences of poor values or insufficient societal reflection become catastrophically larger in scale. CLR identifies a class of worst-case outcomes called s-risks -- scenarios involving astronomical amounts of suffering -- and focuses on understanding the conditions that could lead to such outcomes. Their primary intervention pathway is developing and communicating insights about safe AI development to relevant stakeholders, including AI labs and policymakers. They focus on robust interventions that reduce conflict and promote cooperation in interactions involving powerful AI systems, reasoning that cooperative frameworks are more likely to prevent the deliberate or accidental creation of suffering at scale. They also invest in community building and talent development to grow the pool of researchers working on these problems.
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View on grantmaking.aiThe CLR Summer Research Fellowship is the flagship talent-development program of the Center on Long-Term Risk, a UK-registered charity (No. 1195079) headquartered in London. CLR was originally founded in 2013 as the Foundational Research Institute and rebranded to its current name in March 2020 when it relocated to London. The fellowship launched in 2020 and has run annually since, temporarily doubling the size of CLR's research team each summer.
Fellows are embedded in CLR's research team for 8 weeks on a full-time basis, working on projects tied to CLR's core agendas. The primary current research focus is the Model Persona agenda, which aims to understand the conditions under which AI personas develop malicious traits · including spitefulness, sadism, and punitiveness · and to develop interventions that make AI systems robustly avoid such traits. Secondary areas include Safe Pareto Improvements in AI bargaining scenarios and s-risk macrostrategy…
CLR believes that the most catastrophic outcomes from advanced AI involve scenarios not just of human extinction but of astronomical suffering · AI systems or AI-enabled actors that perpetuate extreme suffering at civilizational scale. The fellowship creates a pipeline of researchers who understand and are motivated to work on these neglected s-risk reduction strategies. By identifying talented researchers early, giving them hands-on experience on live research problems, and building a community oriented around s-risk and cooperative AI, CLR aims to grow the number of high-quality researchers working on these problems, directly increasing the probability that effective interventions are developed before transformative AI is deployed.
The CLR Fund is the grantmaking arm of the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR), a registered charity in England and Wales (charity no. 1195079) headquartered in London. CLR was originally established in 2013 as the Foundational Research Institute (FRI) under the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF), a Swiss nonprofit. It was renamed the Center on Long-Term Risk in March 2020 and became a fully independent UK charity in late 2021; prior to that, all CLR Fund grants were disbursed by EAF. From late 2024 onwards, all grants are paid solely by CLR.
The CLR Fund primarily supports individuals who want to make research contributions to CLR's current priority areas · reducing risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks) from powerful AI systems · but also funds other high-quality projects that the fund managers believe will contribute to s-risk reduction. Recipients may be charitable organizations, academic institutions, or individual researchers. Past grantees have included PhD students (receiving tuition and stipends), academic researchers seeking teaching buyouts, independent researchers, and organizations such as the Wild Animal Initiative. Notable grants include support for research on…
The CLR Fund supports research aimed at reducing s-risks · scenarios in which advanced AI systems cause or enable astronomical amounts of involuntary suffering. By funding researchers and projects at early career stages and in under-resourced areas, the fund attempts to grow a community of experts focused on the worst-case AI risk landscape. The causal chain runs from individual researcher productivity and community capacity, through better understanding of conflict dynamics and cooperation in advanced AI systems, to influencing the technical and policy decisions that will shape AI development trajectories. By increasing the number and quality of people working on these problems, and by funding conceptual work that would otherwise go unfunded, CLR aims to shift the probability distribution of long-run AI futures toward outcomes with less suffering.