Mox is San Francisco's primary AI safety incubator and Effective Altruism community space. Over the last year, we’ve supported high-impact work by hosting fellowships, events, offices and coworking. We’re now looking for individual donors and institutional funding to carry us through the next year!

We're aiming to raise $450k, and think we can effectively deploy up to $1.2m to run more great events, improve our space, and incubate new fellowships. To kick things off, one anonymous donor has offered Mox a 1:1 match up to $100k -- if we can raise $50k+.

Please support us through Manifund, or read on to learn more about our work!

Interested in donating a large amount? Reach out to Rachel Shu, Mox Director at rachel@moxsf.com.

Our first year in review

Mox launched on Feb 15, 2025. In a single year on a shoestring budget, we've become a primary nexus for the AI safety community and other EA-adjacent work in San Francisco. We’ve hosted hundreds of members and thousands of visitors, organized our own public events and fellowship, and supported dozens of other impactful orgs.

By the numbers:

• 183 active members

• 15 private offices

• 377 events hosted

• Partnerships with 19 AI Safety & EA orgs

• 4 floor (40k sq ft) buildout

Fellowships & programs

We supported five residencies in the last year:

• FLF Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning: 30 fellows exploring, researching, and developing potential beneficial AI for Human Reasoning tools.

• PIBBSS Fellowship 2025 (now Principles of Intelligence): 17 fellows in residence for cross-disciplinary AI safety research.

• Seldon Lab Accelerator, Batch 1: 4 startups building AI safety infrastructure, including Andon Labs, Workshop Labs, and Lucid Computing.

• Seldon Lab Accelerator, Batch 2: 6 startups, currently in residence.

• The Frame Fellowship: An 8-week program for 8 video creators communicating about AI safety, developed in-house at Mox.

We also offer our space for retreats, workshops, and hackathons, serving orgs like Tarbell, 1DaySooner, Elicit, Asimov Press, FutureSearch, and AVA International.

Finally, we work with local conferences, hosting pre/post conference coworking and side events for EAG Bay Area, LessOnline, Manifest, and The Curve.

How does Mox contribute to these programs’ success?

• Provides a fully furnished office

• Situates them alongside other groups doing similar work

• Provides event venue space directly connected to their workspace

• Handles daily catering, janitorial and supplies

• Troubleshoots participant tech

Public Events

We hosted 377 events over the last year, including:

• Senator Scott Wiener on AI safety legislation — live Q&A with CA Senator and author of SB-53.

• Sentient Futures Summit — a 350+ attendee, 3-day conference in February 2026 focused on AI and Animal Welfare, as featured in the SF Standard.

• Models in Moral Mazes — Anthropic research scholars previewed an unpublished paper on misalignment at Mox before public release.

• Man vs Machine Hackathon (METR × Factory.AI) — a 300 person, live RCT on AI coding agent productivity

• Q&As and fireside chats with Joe Carlsmith, Eli Lifland, Nate Soares, Scott Aaronson, Joel Becker and Bryan Caplan.

Mox also hosts recurring community events, such as:

• Effective Altruism SF, biweekly events and meetups

• Astral Codex Ten SF, monthly meetups

• 90/30 Club, machine learning paper reading group

• Mathematics with Lean, the interactive theorem prover

Mox has been an invaluable resource for us when running EA SF [Effective Altruism San Francisco], since its large and well-equipped facility allowed us to cater food, run speaker events, workshops, and otherwise host much larger and more ambitious events than we otherwise would have been able to.

— Lead organizers of EA SF

Individuals & Coworking

We currently have 183 active members; on a typical coworking day, 50-80 people are at Mox. A sampling of individual members who are frequently at Mox:

• Justin Kuiper, AI safety video producer

• Ross Rheingans-Yoo, philanthropic investor

• Itsi Weinstock, Senterra Funders

• Kamile Lukosuite, GovAI

• Joshua Levy, Holloway

• Ronak Mehta, AI safety researcher

You can see a list of all members here: https://moxsf.com/people

Testimonials from our August 2025 feedback survey:

It feels like a second home, but more lively. I can always expect to run into a friend who is down to cowork or hang.

— Constance Li, founder of Sentient Futures

I can walk up to anyone and have an interesting conversation; every single person I've met here has welcomed questions about their work and been curious about mine.

— Gavriel Kleinwaks, Horizon Fellow

Mox has the best density of people with the values & capabilities I care about the most. In general, it's more social & feels better organized for serendipity vs any coworking space I've been to before, comparable to perhaps like 0.3 Manifests per month.

— Venki Kumar

Private offices and partner organizations

In Year 1, Mox was home to 15 private offices, including:

• Sentient Futures: promoting animal welfare and sentience research

• Tampersec: building physical computing infrastructure security

• Andon Labs: building autonomous organizations such as Project Vend, via Seldon accelerator

• Pantograph: building a preschool for robots

• BlueDot Impact (pending visa): online courses for AI safety upskilling

We also maintain a Guest Program with 19 partner organizations, providing complimentary drop-in access for a variety of orgs we highly respect. Public program partners include: MIRI, FAR.AI, Redwood Research, Palisade, GovAI, Epoch, AI Impacts, Timaeus, Elicit, Evitable, FAI, and MATS.

Our teammates visit San Francisco a couple of times a month. Instead of renting a coworking spot, Mox gives us a familiar space with friendly faces that we reliably run into. It feels closer to going to the college library with friends than to an office. We hang out there for many hours after our work is done!

— Deger Turan, CEO of Metaculus

Past funding and budget updates

Grant updates

In our initial fundraising post a year ago, we proposed three budget tiers — minimal ($1.6M/year), mainline (~$2M), and ambitious ($3.6M).

What we spent annualized to roughly $1.2M, less than even our ‘minimal’ tier projection. What we delivered landed closer to ‘mainline’: 183 members, 144 Guest Program participants, 15 offices, a team of 5, and 2 tentpole events most months. And from the ‘ambitious’ tier, we succeeded at expanding Mox to all four floors of 1680 Mission.

Mox operates on a lean budget; we believe our per-member and total costs compare favorably to other AI safety hubs such as Constellation, Lighthaven, and LISA. We’ve done this by keeping our team small, finding good deals on rent and furnishings, and charging fair prices to our members and clients. We expect monthly revenue to continue growing by $10-15k/mo for the next 3-6 months, with offices and memberships both scaling steadily, and project steady state expenses to be ~$150k/month.

See our monthly revenue and expenses spreadsheet: May 2025 - Jan 2026

Budget basics

Grant funding (Craig Falls & EAIF): $300k
Grant funding (Manifund): $500k
Revenue to date: $600k
Projected revenue in 2026: $1.4m

• 35% — Memberships

• 35% — Offices

• 20% — Programs

• 10% — Events

Projected costs in 2026: $1.5m

• 40% — Labor

• 30% — Rent & utilities

• 25% — Office supplies

• 5% — Event costs

(all figures approximate)

Upcoming Plans

1. Grow and improve our main offerings

Events:

• More major conferences like Sentient Futures Summit

• More public talks with key speakers like Senator Weiner

• Improve our first floor and make it highly usable and more publicly accessible, building our ability to provide a good space, which mostly shows up in the impact we have, and somewhat in revenue.

Programs:

• Serve repeat cohorts of the fellowship programs that have used our space so far

• Additionally serve 3-7 new fellowships and workshops in this coming year

Coworking:

• Continue growing our community of individual members to 120-150 daily users, 300+ total members

• Maintain the ability to select private offices based on fit, rather than market rate

• Create additional meeting rooms and other communal areas in the coworking space

2. Attract international talent via Global Expert Fellowship

A key part of our second-year vision is the Global Expert Fellowship: hosting independent researchers, domain specialists, and builders through J-1 visa programs to create new frontier technology collaborations within the Mox community and internationally. Learn more here.

This may be the highest-impact thing we can achieve this year. It has immediate external impact by enabling independent researchers to quickly enter the US to do work, and it strengthens Mox by expanding our network of high-quality talent. Mox is in a rare position to pull this off, as we are able to meet State Department requirements for visa-qualifying cultural exchange which many other organizations cannot.

3. Incubate new workshops and programs

We have an advantage in creating our own programs, sourcing from the talent pool we're developing.

Upcoming example: the Muybridge Fellowship for Visual Interpretability, which would bring together technical visual and interactive pioneers to improve the presentation of mechanistic interpretability research and broaden its accessibility. This builds on the experience gained running the existing Frame Fellowship.

Support Mox

Thank you for reading this! We'd appreciate your support, whether via:

• A direct donation (through Manifund, or contact Rachel Shu at rachel@moxsf.com)

• Sharing this fundraiser with other potential donors

• Leaving a comment about your own experience of Mox

And of course, we're always on the lookout for excellent members, orgs, or events to work with us; please send them our way!