Holden Karnofsky is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he focuses on the design of the company's Responsible Scaling Policy and other aspects of preparing for the possibility of highly advanced AI systems in the future.
Holden was previously a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he wrote about the principles behind voluntary commitments such as the Responsible Scaling Policy and how they can serve as a pragmatic approach to reducing risks from AI. Prior to that, Holden served as co-founder and CEO (and later co-CEO) of Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy has been one of the largest philanthropic funders of both AI risk reduction and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness since 2015. It also works in a number of other areas including global health R&D (including work toward universal flu and syphilis vaccines, hepatitis B cures and malaria gene drives), land use reform (it was the first institutional funder of the YIMBY movement), and farm animal welfare (where its grantees have won thousands of commitments for improved animal treatment). Prior to his work at Open Philanthropy, Holden co-founded and served as co-Executive Director of GiveWell, whose public charity recommendations direct hundreds of millions of dollars per year.