Emerging Challenges Fund

A message from the Longview Philanthropy team:

We are closing the Emerging Challenges Fund (ECF) and are no longer accepting new donations. Donations already in progress that are received by Giving What We Can by 30 September 2026 will be included in the fund’s final grant round. If you have a recurring donation through Giving What We Can, they will contact you directly about next steps. We plan to publish a final grant report for the fund later this year.

We launched the fund in August 2022 so that any donor could support effective, legible work on extreme risks from emerging technologies. Since then, more than 2,000 donors have contributed, and the fund has granted more than $3.5 million to organizations working to reduce risks from advanced AI, engineered pathogens, and nuclear weapons. We are proud of this work and are deeply grateful to every donor who made it possible.

We decided to close the fund because running a public, cross-cause fund well requires sustained time and attention, and Longview’s comparative advantage lies in advising major donors. This was a difficult decision, and we are grateful to Giving What We Can for four years of partnership.

If you would like to keep supporting this kind of work, Giving What We Can’s Risks and Resilience Fund remains open. We have not evaluated it in depth, but the Risks and Resilience Fund supports work on the same risks, accepts donations at any time, and its allocations to date have included the ECF itself. For any other questions, you can contact the GWWC team here.

Featured Grants
Interpretability at Harvard University
Interpretability at Harvard University
Looking inside modern AI systems

Frontier AI models are a black box. Today we have almost no ability to understand why the most powerful AI systems make the decisions that they do, making AI systems unpredictable and difficult to align with human values. A new lab at Harvard University is trying to change that through their work on “mechanistic interpretability,” a field of research to understand how networks function internally. On our recommended grant, Harvard researchers will progress their work to locate specific concepts and facts within a neural network.

Blueprint Biosecurity far-UVC work
Blueprint Biosecurity far-UVC work
Testing technology for clean air

Certain wavelengths of germicidal light called "far-UVC" inactivate pathogens in the air and on surfaces while appearing to be safe for humans. Could this be a powerful tool for reducing the spread of infectious disease, and even stop or slow the next outbreak which would become a pandemic? This funding will be used to commission research into how much far-UVC is likely to reduce pathogen transmission, and its safety profile, making it possible to understand how best to deploy it.

Past Grant Reports

We describe our 2025 grantmaking in our 2025 Annual Report.

For older grants, please consult the grant reports below.

2024 Annual Report

December 2023 Grants Report

August 2023 Grants Report

2022 Grants Report

Disclosures

The Emerging Challenges Fund is managed by Longview Philanthropy, with support from Giving What We Can. Donations to the Emerging Challenges Fund through Giving What We Can’s website are donations to Giving What We Can. All funds are disbursed based on recommendations by Longview Philanthropy.

Fund Managers
Emerging Challenges Fund
Simran Dhaliwal
CEO
Simran coordinates Longview Philanthropy’s research, grantmaking, and advising work. Prior to joining, she was a research analyst at Goldman Sachs, working on a two-person team recognised as the best sell-side stockpickers in London in 2018. While there, she also became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and was donating to high-impact charities. Simran read philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford, where she first came across the concept of using evidence and reason to do the most good at a Giving What We Can talk.
Emerging Challenges Fund
Carl Robichaud
Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Director
Carl leads Longview’s programme on nuclear weapons policy and co-manages Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. Carl previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation.
Emerging Challenges Fund
Matthew Gentzel
Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Officer
Matthew conducts grant investigations for Longview’s programme on nuclear weapons policy and co-manages its Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. His prior work spanned emerging technology threat and policy assessment, focusing on how advancements in AI may shape influence operations, nuclear strategy, and cyber attacks. He has worked as a policy researcher with OpenAI, an analyst in the US Department of Defense’s Innovation Steering Group, and director of research and analysis at the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
Emerging Challenges Fund
Dr Zach Freitas-Groff
AI Programme Officer
 
Zach conducts grant investigations in artificial intelligence (AI). He completed his PhD in economics at Stanford University, where he received support from the National Science Foundation, the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Zach has conducted research covered by The New York Times, Reuters, Marginal Revolution, and Vox. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at Innovations for Poverty Action and the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University.