Who pays whom
Jaan Tallinn funds the campus, the sermon, and the inspector out of the same shop.
Survival & Flourishing Fund publishes the recommendation tables. On the big recent lines the funder is almost always him. Lightcone Infrastructure is where Ronny Fernandez draws a paycheck and where Plz Don’t Kill Us parks its people. MIRI is the shop that program names as a funder. METR is the evaluator Dario Amodei pointed at when Anthropic committed to a permanent embed. Same trunk. Three different jobs.
Coxon himself is not an SFF grant. He is a Good Ventures scholarship. The filing is below.
We also went looking for a wire from this stack into the foreign-influence and Singham / CodePink money mapped next door. It is not on the filings. Parallel machines. Dollars first. The empty checks after that, once.
Musk’s $10 million to the Future of Life Institute in 2015, and Tallinn’s FLI and SFF roles, are on the Rooke check. Unverified PauseAI-neighborhood tip dollars stay off this page.
The essay this map sits under: They Have to Create the Beast First.
In this report: BLUF · Research map · Report assets · Amplification scoreboard · Weekend timeline · Money graph · Thesis audit · Follow-on checks · Evidence & sources
Coxon on the return
Good Ventures paid Jacob Coxon $20,159. It is on the 2022 private-foundation return, Form 990-PF, Part XV, page 12. The purpose line reads Long-term Future Scholarship Program — Research Scholarship. That is not the Long-Term Future Fund. Different program name.
Same page, same purpose family: Nathan Calvin, $114,050. That is his scholarship, not a payment to Coxon. Calvin shows up later next to Encode.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Filer | Good Ventures. Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. |
| EIN | 46-1008520 |
| Tax year | July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023 |
| Coxon | $20,159. Research scholarship. |
| Calvin | $114,050. Same purpose family. Not Coxon’s money. |
| Return | Candid PDF · our copy · text · Grant Bay row |
The map
The cash that held. Tallinn and Survival & Flourishing Fund into the advocacy neighborhood and the meter. Good Ventures into the Alignment Research Center, then METR. Coxon is the scholarship line on that same return, not a grant from the fund.
Open Philanthropy does not have a named grant straight to METR. The cash path on the filings is Open Philanthropy into the Alignment Research Center, $1,515,000 in 2022, then ARC’s spin-off into METR, $4,477,169. Coefficient says METR is not a Coefficient grantee. It points individuals at METR. It does not list METR as its own grant.
Names
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| SFF | Survival & Flourishing Fund. Publishes recommended grant amounts. |
| METR | Model Evaluation & Threat Research. Used to be ARC Evals. |
| ARC | Alignment Research Center. The spin-off dollars into METR sit here. |
| Lightcone | Infrastructure nonprofit in the LessWrong / Lighthaven orbit. Ronny Fernandez’s employer. EIN 92-0861538. |
| PDKU | Plz Don’t Kill Us. Aella and Ronny’s creator program. |
| Match / ‡ | A pledge to match other people’s gifts. Not cash. Never add it to a cash total. Line-by-line: SFF matching. |
| DAF | Donor-advised fund. The sponsor’s name is public. The person who advised the gift often is not. |
| AIPI | AI Policy Institute, an SFF payee via the Hack Foundation. Not AIPN. That distinction is on the scoreboard. |
Aella, not Ella. Samuel Marks (@saprmarks) is not Luke Samuel Marks.
The fund
Selected recent rows from SFF recommendations. Funder on these lines is Tallinn unless the row says otherwise. A row marked match is a pledge ceiling.
| Round | Recipient | Amount | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| SFF-2025 | Lightcone Infrastructure, Inc. | $661,000 + $650,000 match | Employer of the PDKU cofounder. Lighthaven campus. |
| SFF-2025 | MIRI | $1,607,000 match-flagged | Named PDKU funder. Yudkowsky’s shop. |
| SFF-2025 | METR, Inc. | $120,000 + $428,000 match | Amodei’s named evaluator. |
| SFF-2025 | CAIS / CAIS Action Fund | $289k / $772k | Frame’s amplifier lane. Post-program contracts. |
| SFF-2025 | AI Lab Watch via Lightcone | $371,000 | Lab-watch narrative, same campus pipe. |
| SFF-2024 | Lightcone Infrastructure Inc. | $513,500 | Same trunk, prior year. |
| SFF-2024 | METR, Inc. | $204,000 | Same trunk, prior year. |
| SFF-2024 | CAIS / CAIS Action Fund | $1,146,000 / $1,621,000 | Same trunk, prior year. |
| Initiative Committee 2024 | Lightcone (via CFAR as payee) | $1,720,000 + $200,000 | Older Lightcone-scale money. |
| SFF-2024 | Manifund (Manifold for Charity) | $90,000 | Austin Chen’s platform. He advises Frame. |
| SFF-2024 | Tarbell Fellowship (Players Philanthropy Fund) | $520,000 | Journalism fellowship. Same donor, different medium. |
A match is not cash. On the 2025 table, Lightcone’s match looks wired. METR’s $428,000 match was still open on the last read, deadline September 30, 2026, and the net standard cash on that METR line was $0. Do not add the two. The conflict on Lightcone’s match footnote ($650k in the report, $500k still sitting on the matching table) is on SFF matching.
He does not need a line item titled “Plz Don’t Kill Us” for the graph to close. He funds the employer, the named sponsor, and the evaluator in the same rounds.
Before SFF, the pipe into MIRI was the Beri Support Fund.
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Tallinn → Beri Support Fund → MIRI | $600,000. His ledger says via=BSF, dated 2019-02-26. BSF’s FY2019 Schedule I matches. EIN 82-4039090. |
| What BSF was | A 509(a)(3) Type I supporting organization of BERI, EIN 81-4820272. Critch in the chair. Closed at year-end 2021. |
| Open Philanthropy → BSF | Not on the schedules. |
| Don’t mix the checks | BERI’s own roughly $300,000 to MIRI is a different pipe. SFF is what replaced BSF as Tallinn’s org-grant vehicle. |
The campus
Lightcone Infrastructure Inc., EIN 92-0861538. Berkeley 501(c)(3), tax-exempt October 2023. Address on the filings: 2740 Telegraph Ave, the Lighthaven cluster.
| Fact | Number | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 revenue | about $1.58 million | Cause IQ |
| FY2025 revenue | $9.74 million | Cause IQ |
| Fiscal sponsor, the organization | Flagged | Cause IQ and the 990 Part III. This is not a list of project names. |
| Ronny Fernandez, Campus Generalist | $157,750 | Cause IQ and the FY2025 990 |
| Silicon Valley Community Foundation, December 2024, Education | $590,000 | Unmasked as SFF. Donor: Tallinn. |
| DAFgiving360 / Schwab | $263,100 | The sponsor is public. The advising donor is not. Tallinn is already on the SVCF line, so this is someone else. |
| Every.org | $233,483 | Cause IQ |
| Fidelity, FY2025 | $188,119 | Advising donor sealed. Tallinn ruled out. |
| CFAR “Prototype” | $77,448 | Fiscal wind-down. Restricted-fund reconciliation. Not an SFF mega-grant and not PDKU. |
| Only organization grant on the FY2024 Schedule I | Rose Garden LLC, EIN 88-4056757, $158,765 | The 990 |
| FY2025, Rose Garden is Lighthaven | $4.28 million expenses, $2.10 million revenue | The 990. Habryka is manager. Slimrock, Tallinn’s side, holds a $20 million mortgage. |
| Lightcone Commons | Same EIN 92-0861538 | Tallinn $10 million conditional, plus a Moskovitz / Coefficient first round around $5 million, plus anonymous, LTFF, and ARM money. Commons site. |
| Good Ventures → MIRI | $195,000 | Cause IQ history note |
| SVCF → MIRI, December 2024, Sciences | $50,000 | Same unmask. Tallinn / SFF. Not a foreign-influence fund. |
| MIRI | EIN 58-2565917 | |
| MIRI FY2024 Schedule I | No organization grantees | One research grant $119,058. Prizes $161,478 across 704 people. No “PDKU” or “Aella” on the return. The program is 2026. |
Plz Don’t Kill Us
| What they say | Where |
|---|---|
| Funded by MIRI and SFF. About an $800,000 goal, about 60% raised at the April 2026 launch. | SF Standard, founder interview |
| “Funding from MIRI and others.” Waiting on Lightcone Commons for 2027. | plzdontkillus.com |
| “Partially funded by MIRI.” | Transformer News |
| July 2026 cohort: 57 creators, 112 million-plus views claimed. Stipend and prizes. Grimes and Yudkowsky as mentors. | The program’s own count. Treat the view total as theirs. |
| A line item that says MIRI or SFF paid PDKU $X | Not found under PDKU’s own name on the SFF applicant list. Likely MIRI program spend, campus support, or both. The FY2026 return is the one that could show it. |
| Its own 501(c)(3) | No. ProPublica returned zero organizations. |
Here is the correction, because the first pass overclaimed it. Lightcone is a fiscal sponsor as an organization. Plz Don’t Kill Us is not on Habryka’s sponsored-project list, and it has no Every.org project page. Those slugs 404. Search comes back empty. Lightcone’s own Every.org page is real, and it shows EIN 92-0861538, with no PDKU designation on it.
Working picture: an unincorporated creator program, MIRI and SFF named in the press, rent-free space at Lighthaven, Ronny on the Lightcone payroll. The 2027 gate is the Commons recommendations, about October 23, 2026.
Frame Fellowship
Different pool. Don’t staple it to Tallinn just because both fund “AI safety creators.”
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Previous lead funder is the AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund. | Frame’s own FAQ, as quoted by reporters |
| AISTOF is a pooled fund. Founder JueYan Zhang, ex-BlackRock. More than $30 million raised. 150+ grants since 2023. | Manifund AIS funder bulletin. The limited partners are not published. |
| Advisor Austin Chen cofounded Manifund. Manifund took $90,000 from SFF in 2024. | Frame’s manifesto and the SFF table |
| After the program: FLI, Control AI, BlueDot, Seismic, CAIS contracts. | Frame’s site and the EA Forum |
| Cohort 2: $10,000 stipend, plus housing, meals, and flights, ten weeks. Akshyae Singh and Austin Chen. | framefellowship.com |
| FLI also runs a Digital Media Accelerator for AI-risk creators. | aisafety.com/funding |
Tallinn money reaching Frame’s advisor’s platform is not the same sentence as Tallinn sitting in the AISTOF pool. We don’t have the partner list.
The inspector
METR, EIN 99-1219864. 501(c)(3), Covina, California. Latest 990-class summary: about $13.6 million revenue, about $6.5 million assets. FY2024 contributions $13.60 million. The names on Schedule B are restricted on the public copy. ProPublica.
| What | Number | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Alignment Research Center, the spin-off | $4,477,169 | Cause IQ |
| Vanguard Charitable | $4,000,000 | Cause IQ. The conduit is real. The advising donor is not on the public return. |
| Founders Pledge | $184,000 | Cause IQ, plus more smaller grantmakers on that list |
| About $71 million in commitments, prior six months, announced August 14, 2026 | A total, not a split | METR’s funding update. The thank-you list has no per-funder amounts. Audacious, about $17 million, sits outside that window. SFF is nowhere near $71 million. |
| SFF lines, 2024 and 2025 | In the table above | SFF |
| “Have not accepted funding from AI companies.” Will not take gifts made by lab staff or at their direction. | Their rule | METR’s about page and the funding update |
| Free tokens from the labs | They say they take them | Same pages. Cash independence is not compute independence. About $600,000 in unnamed free-credit shows up as a crumb in the theft disclosure. Per-lab dollar amounts are not itemized. |
| Named Open Philanthropy, Coefficient, or Good Ventures grant “to METR” | Not found | The $1,515,000 hits ARC. The spin-off is a separate check. |
Amodei names METR in We Must Pace the Frontier and commits Anthropic, on its own, to permanent employee-level access for embedded evaluators. That is the install. It is not a statute. Beth Barnes left Anthropic for METR. That is personnel, not a grant.
METR’s “no lab money” sentence does not close the conflict. A Series A angel can still fund the inspector through SFF, and a sealed donor-advised fund can still land $4 million without a name. Free tokens are the soft version of the same problem.
Same people, the lab
| Edge | What is actually on paper |
|---|---|
| Tallinn led Anthropic’s Series A | $124 million, 2021. Same person as the SFF trunk. His ownership stake is not in the round docs we used. |
| Holden Karnofsky | Coefficient / Open Philanthropy. Married to Daniela Amodei. Joined Anthropic. The donor shop and the lab are not strangers. |
| Co-founder wealth pledge, 80% | Public. Names no recipients. Reading it as a future recycle into these nonprofits is a guess, not a 990 line. |
| Ajeya Cotra | Former Open Philanthropy AI lead. Now at METR. Paul Christiano at ARC is married to her. Coefficient’s eval RFP says the task standard builds on METR, and the footnote is right there. |
Next door
The editorial’s bet is that doomerism is a funded product line, not weather, and that the same trunk waters the sermon and the inspector. That read is the essay. The filings above are the part with amounts.
The other question was whether this trunk shares a payer with the Singham / CodePink / foreign-influence stack, or whether European climate philanthropy is the hidden bridge. On the schedules and primary lists we opened, no.
| What we checked | What came back |
|---|---|
| SVCF on both Lightcone and MIRI | Tallinn, through SFF. $590,000 and $50,000. Not a Singham fund. |
| Players Philanthropy Fund, year-end 2021 through 2024 | EA money reaches Tarbell through PPF. Those Schedule I filings do not name the Singham-six or the core letter brands. |
| Expanded Cause IQ grantmakers for Lightcone, MIRI, and METR | EA groups, donor-advised funds, ARC, BERI. No Arabella. No Singham. |
| The other direction: large EA donors into Singham’s funders | No. That side is dominated by Goldman Sachs donor-advised, JEF, and Arc. Vanguard appears as a pipe only. |
| Arabella, New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell, into EA | No EA organization on those schedules. No EA x-risk project name under them. Arabella is a recipient of letter-aisle money, not the payer of this trunk. |
| Shared officers or board seats | None on the Part VII lists we read. Singham-to-PSL adjacency stays inside that aisle. |
| Vanguard Charitable’s $4 million to METR | Conduit confirmed. Advising donor unnamed. Not Singham. Tallinn’s separate Vanguard gift, $787,000, went to AISTOF, not this $4 million. |
| AISTOF / Frame limited partners | Unpublished. |
| NCRI’s CodePink / Singham file | Their documentation of that aisle holds. It does not plug into this payroll. |
| METR’s thank-you foundations, checked against Singham-six | No. |
| Packard | On METR’s thank-you list, and also a funder of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. A climate and advocacy foundation. The METR amount is not itemized. Pew is the same shape: letter-aisle adjacency, no dollar. Not a paper trail from Oak to METR. |
| Schmidt | Schmidt Family Foundation, on the letter aisle, is not Schmidt Sciences, the name on METR’s thank-you list. |
| Vanguard and Fidelity, also showing up at CodePink | Same sponsor brands. Advising donors unnamed. A brand is not a bridge. |
| PauseAI, FLI, CAIS Action Fund, against CodePink operations | No joint operation. Stop Killer Robots is the same issue-space. CAIS’s chip-security line conflicts with CodePink’s China frame. |
| Tarbell fellows against Singham-adjacent media | No grant. A Guardian piece that carries both Medea Benjamin and a Tarbell fellow is a masthead, not a wire. |
| Fight for the Future / Free Press and an EA-pause bridge | No. Fight for the Future’s moratorium papers don’t name PauseAI, FLI, METR, or CodePink. Schmidt Family money into Fight for the Future is not Schmidt Sciences money into METR. |
| Shared vendors (CPA, PR, events) | No. The named shops diverge. PayPal, Stripe, and Every.org are generic rails. |
| China-compute talking points | Parallel stories: containment, partner, pause-treaty. No cash between them. |
| City calendars, PauseAI against CodePink | No overlap in the metro sample. |
| FLI’s LAWS roster and CAIS’s statement signers | No Singham names in the dumps we read. |
| California AG, Emerson, Yield, FOIA, Audacious, on the Vanguard advisee | The public paths do not name the person. After Bonta, California charity filings drop Schedule B. The IRS public copy is restricted. |
| Oak, Quadrature Climate Foundation, CIFF, ClimateWorks and its intermediaries | No named grant into this EA stack. |
| KR, IKEA Foundation, Wellcome, Arcadia | No. Wyss shows up on the letter aisle only. |
| Dual officers between those climate shops and this stack | None found. |
European EA money is a different aisle. Don’t file it under climate philanthropy. Effektiv Spenden, about €128,000 to METR. Longview, about $220,000 to METR. Founders Pledge into CAIS.
Inside this world, the trunk is real. Campus, sermon, inspector, and a Series A. Across the aisle, what matches is ideology and a couple of donor-advised-fund logos. A logo without the advising donor is not a shared payer.
Four sentences that are not supported, so they stay out of the writeup. Lightcone “hosts” PDKU as a named sponsored project. Open Philanthropy “funds METR” as a named grant. The Vanguard $4 million “is Tallinn.” SVCF “is Singham-adjacent.”
Still sealed
- METR’s FY2025 Form 990. Recheck from about November 17, 2026. When it lands, the public copy still will not name Schedule B donors.
- Who advised the three sealed gifts: Vanguard $4 million to METR, Schwab $263,100 to Lightcone, Fidelity $188,119 to Lightcone. The public paths above are exhausted.
- The exact MIRI or SFF dollar split into Plz Don’t Kill Us. That waits on FY2026 filings and the Commons disbursement, roughly October 2026 through January 2027.
- AISTOF’s limited partners. Still unpublished.
Sources (live + mirrored)
| What | Live | Receipt |
|---|---|---|
| Good Ventures 990-PF — Coxon $20,159 / Calvin $114,050 | Candid PDF | PDF · txt · Grant Bay |
| SFF recommendations (cash + ‡) | survivalandflourishing.fund/recommendations | HTML · 2025 capture |
| Match vs cash on the same cells | Matching pledges | — |
| METR about / donor ban | metr.org/about | HTML |
| METR ~$71M funding update | metr.org | HTML |
| Amodei Pace the Frontier (names METR) | darioamodei.com | HTML · clock on Weekend timeline |
| Anthropic Series A (Tallinn led) | anthropic.com | HTML |
| Musk → FLI $10M (2015) | FLI Wayback | Wayback HTML · edges on Follow-on · Rooke |
| Lightcone Infrastructure (EIN 92-0861538) | lightconeinfrastructure.com · ProPublica | — |
| METR filings index (EIN 99-1219864) | ProPublica · Cause IQ | — |
| Plz Don’t Kill Us | plzdontkillus.com · SF Standard · Transformer News | — |
| Frame Fellowship / AISTOF | framefellowship.com · Manifund AIS funder bulletin · aisafety.com/funding | — |
| Dollar holds on the scoreboard | Amplification scoreboard | — |
| Tip edges that feed this trunk (Bass / Rooke) | Follow-on checks | — |
| The essay this map sits under | They Have to Create the Beast First | — |
Full drawer: Evidence & sources