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The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization founded in March 2014 by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, UC Santa Cruz physicist Anthony Aguirre, DeepMind research scientist Viktoriya Krakovna, and Tufts University researcher Meia Chita-Tegmark. Its mission is to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.
FLI focuses on three primary technology domains: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons. The organization pursues its mission through four main activities: policy development and advocacy, grantmaking, research support, and public outreach and education.
In its early years, FLI organized a landmark 2015 conference in Puerto Rico that brought together leading AI researchers to discuss beneficial AI development, and launched the world's first peer-reviewed grant program dedicated to AI safety research, initially funded by a $10 million donation from Elon Musk. In January 2017, FLI convened the Beneficial AI conference that produced the Asilomar AI Principles, one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles, now signed by over 1,200 AI…
FLI believes that how transformative technologies are developed and deployed will be the most critical factor determining life's future. Their theory of change operates across multiple channels: bridging the gap between technical experts who understand transformative technologies and the public institutions with the legitimacy and means to govern them through policy advocacy; directly funding research on insufficiently addressed technological risks through grantmaking; educating policymakers, technologists, and the general public about both the challenges and opportunities of powerful technologies; designing new institutions and governance frameworks for managing world-changing technologies; and convening global stakeholders to coordinate action on existential risks. By working at the intersection of technical expertise and institutional governance, FLI aims to ensure that advanced AI, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons are managed in ways that reduce catastrophic risk while enabling beneficial outcomes.
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View on grantmaking.aiThe Future of Life Institute Podcast is an educational outreach program of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. The podcast launched in 2015 and has grown to over 269 episodes as of early 2026, making it one of the longest-running and most comprehensive audio resources on existential risk and AI safety.
The show has been hosted by several people over its history. Ariel Conn and Lucas Perry were earlier hosts and directors, with Perry notably leading the AI Alignment Podcast sub-series from roughly 2018 to 2020, which explored technical and non-technical aspects of AI alignment with researchers at organizations including DeepMind, OpenAI, and MIRI. The current host and director is Gus Docker, who studied philosophy and computer science at the University of Copenhagen and is active in Effective Altruism Denmark…
The FLI Podcast aims to reduce existential risk by spreading awareness, building a shared understanding, and shaping discourse among researchers, policymakers, and the broader public. By conducting in-depth interviews with leading thinkers on AI safety, governance, and related topics, the podcast helps surface and disseminate important ideas, builds the intellectual community around existential risk reduction, and may influence the beliefs and priorities of listeners who include researchers, funders, and decision-makers. Educational outreach of this kind is treated by FLI as a complement to its grantmaking and policy advocacy work.
The Future of Life Institute's fellowship programs are a talent-pipeline initiative within FLI designed to cultivate the next generation of AI safety researchers. Launched in 2021 with support from a $25 million commitment by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the programs are administered jointly with the Beneficial AI Foundation (BAIF) and branded as the Vitalik Buterin Fellowships in AI Existential Safety.
The fellowship portfolio comprises three tracks. The Technical PhD Fellowship in AI Existential Safety provides full tuition and fees for up to five years of doctoral study, an annual stipend of $40,000 for students at US, UK, or Canadian universities, and a $10,000 annual research fund for travel and computing. The Technical Postdoctoral Fellowship in AI Existential Safety offers an $80,000 annual stipend plus $10,000 research fund for up to three years. The US-China AI Governance PhD Fellowship, launched in 2024, mirrors the PhD stipend structure and focuses on scholarship about how international cooperation can mitigate risks from US-China AI competition, including global governance mechanisms, institutional designs for cooperation, and comparative risk management…
FLI's fellowship program operates on the theory that the field of AI existential safety is talent-constrained, and that supporting early-career researchers financially enables them to pursue safety work they might otherwise be unable to afford. By covering tuition, stipends, and research expenses, FLI removes financial barriers to entering the field. The conflict-of-interest clause is designed to prevent fellows from being drawn into capability-advancing roles at frontier AI labs, preserving their independence and safety-focused orientation. Over time, a growing cohort of well-trained, financially independent safety researchers is expected to produce the technical and governance breakthroughs needed to reduce existential risk from advanced AI.