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Manifund is launching a new animal welfare fund, led by regrantor Marcus Abramovitch. We make rapid (<1 week), early-stage ($25k–$150k) grants across animal welfare, with a particular interest in the intersection of animals and transformative AI.
Reach out to marcus.s.abramovitch@gmail.com if you’d like to donate!
Many EAs take seriously both the welfare of animals, and the possibility of short AI timelines. But EA funders currently consider these in isolation. AI safety grants mostly ignore potential outcomes for non-human beings. And animal welfare grants assume business-as-usual, that our world in 10 years mostly looks like the world today.
We don’t expect this to be the case. One major goal of the fund will be to identify and create opportunities so that transformative AI secures good outcomes for animals. Some example projects we’d like to fund:
Animal harm benchmarks. There are only a handful of animal harm benchmarks, none of which adopted by frontier labs. Other benchmarks that are well known and used (SWE bench, FrontierMath) came about through rising to the top of a marketplace of benchmarks. The same should happen with animal welfare benchmarks. Many benchmarks should be created, some by established ML engineers with the goal that one or two get traction to “hill-climb” on.
Animal Welfare Constitutions: Recently, Claude’s constitution was published with a value of “Welfare of animals and of all sentient beings” when determining how to respond to a prompt. This is one line of an 84 page document from one frontier lab. There should be ready made versions of texts of various lengths for constitutions, system cards, etc. to improve model behaviours and considerations for animals.
Watchdog organization: As AI begins to take effect across industries, there is a good chance the factory farming industry and others will start to use AI in ways beyond Precision Livestock Farming that will be important to get out ahead of. Keeping an eye on industry practices as well as effects on wild animals will be important to identify high-leverage, urgent interventions
Animal welfare salience in AI labs: Assuming AI systems are going to have profound effects on the world, it is important for those shaping the technology to be aware of and care about issues related to animal welfare as they are developing a technology with potentially large lock-in effects
(We also expect to place some bets on non-AI opportunities that are unusually strong.)
One of the top complaints among grantees is the glacial pace of funding decisions. To a founder deciding to leave their job or making their first hire, a quick response can be make-or-break. In other domains, Tyler Cowen’s Fast Grants and Jueyan Zhang’s AISTOF show that multi-month-long reviews don’t have to be the default. In the for profit world, VCs similarly make decisions incredibly quickly.
By having one directly responsible individual for this fund, we eschew the overheads in typical grantmaking. As a Manifund regrantor on AI safety, Marcus has turned around funding decisions <1 week; Manifund is able to wire funds in <3 days after that. We’re bringing this speed to the animal welfare space to serve early-stage orgs.
This fund represents a bet on Marcus’s taste and execution. He’s already funded many successful early-stage projects, and is fluent in both animal welfare as well as AI/AI safety issues.
Marcus has been a hardcore earn-to-give EA. He's personally donated ~$1.5m, representing >60% of his lifetime earnings, primarily to animal welfare. He earned this money through poker, cryptocurrency/quant trading, prediction markets, and advising a family office. (He was, for a time until he quit, the #1 trader on Manifold by all-time profit.)
Animal track record. Marcus has been an early backer of many projects that are now considered standout animal welfare charities, including:
Shrimp Welfare Project — electrical stunner placements now spare ~3.3 billion shrimp/year
Society for the Protection of Insects — state-level bans on insect factory farming
Compassion Aligned Machine Learning — animal-welfare evals for frontier AI
Animal Pain Research Institute — comparative genomics and welfare breeding to reduce pain
AI safety regranting record. This highlights Marcus’s eye for talent and understanding of frontier AI development. From a $100k Manifund regranting budget in 2023, Marcus funded:
Marius Hobbhahn, then starting Apollo Research
Jesse Hoogland, then starting Timaeus
Joseph Bloom, who went on to lead Whitebox Interp at UK AISI
Lisa Thiergart, who went on to lead MIRI's technical governance team
Marcus also nudged his friend Ege Erdil to start Mechanize, and offered them their first investment.
We're fans of the EA Animal Welfare Fund, the Navigation Fund, CG Farmed Animal Welfare and others in this space. We’re starting this fund as an alternative, for several reasons:
First, AI x animals. Others don’t currently prioritize interventions that focus on a transformative AI world. We’re much more AI-pilled and expect there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for this reason. The AI x Animals RFP and SFF's 2026 round seem good, but neither are currently fundraising.
Second, speed of deployment. We think that there is a need for much faster deployment of funds given our timelines for transformative AI. Especially when it comes to piloting new projects and starting new orgs, we need to move as fast as the AI landscape is moving to support effective interventions.
Third, transparency. As with other grants on Manifund, every grant and rationale by this fund will be made in public on our site, in real time. Donors and grantees will be able to evaluate our decisions for themselves. We think this is good for the ecosystem as a public benefit to build trust, share information and give potential donors a much better insight to what we are doing.
Fourth, active grantmaking. Marcus plans on reaching out to promising individuals rather than primarily taking inbound applications. He has a wide network to draw upon, across the animal welfare, AI, and AI safety ecosystems.
Reach out to marcus.s.abramovitch@gmail.com if you’d like to donate, or book a call here.
We’re targeting an initial $2m raise by May 15. Marcus is taking no salary; Manifund runs ops and fiscal sponsorship with a 5% overhead.
Manifund is a 501c3 registered charity (officially “Manifold for Charity Inc.”), EIN 88-3668801; we can accept donations through DAFs, direct wire/bank transfer, crypto, and credit card.
Austin Chen
about 11 hours ago
I'm also making a small personal donation as a sign of support. Marcus has repeatedly impressed me with his hard work, dedication and sacrifice towards doing good. And also with his prescience as a forecaster and investor!
Cause-prio-wise, I'm more into AI safety than animal welfare, but I think some hedging is appropriate, along moral parliament grounds. I'm also excited for AI welfare and rights, and expect some commonalities between that field and the Falcon Fund.
Constance Li
about 12 hours ago
I’m excited to support this. I’m especially glad to see an explicitly AI-pilled animal welfare fund. If AI changes the world as much as many of us expect, animal welfare strategy needs to adapt now rather than assume business as usual or wait until it is potentially too late and we lose the window of opportunity.
I’m also strongly supportive of grantmaking that can move quickly and give applicants useful feedback. That feels especially important for early-stage projects in a fast-moving space.
Itsi Weinstock
about 14 hours ago
I'm so excited for Marcus to be starting this. The AIxAnimals field is so neglected that this seems like a clearly great bet. Interest in the field has been growing due to Sentient Futures' good work, and I'm glad Marcus is putting time into making sure the most critical projects get put into the world.
