Nonprofit roles are 2.5 times as common in AI safety

Where do the people focused on AI safety work today? We estimate that 27.8% have a nonprofit role. The share in other areas is 11.2%. Nonprofit roles are 2.5 times as common in safety.

Key findings

• 32 of 115 safety people with known current affiliations have a nonprofit role.
• 37.4% of safety people have university roles. The corresponding share in other areas is 61.2%.
• Anthropic has the largest current safety count, at 11.

Which organizations have safety people?

We track people shaping AI and group them by their first specific area in their profile tags. Here, safety means safety, alignment and evaluation, including interpretability. Policy, ethics and society form a separate area.

Our selected sample compares 115 safety people with 2,759 others who have known current organizations. Each group needs at least 30 people. Current organizations are unknown for 7 in safety and 420 in other areas. We exclude 1 person without a mapped area.

Paired bars compare safety with other primary areas across nonprofits, universities, companies, government and labs. A person with several roles can appear in several types.

Source: People of Superintelligence biographies and career records; OpenAlex (CC0), as of 18 October 2026. Parent organizations include their labs. Current affiliations can include board, advisory and concurrent roles.

Data table

Organization type	Safety people	Share of safety	Other people	Share of other areas
Nonprofits	32	27.8%	308	11.2%
Universities	43	37.4%	1,688	61.2%
Companies	55	47.8%	1,068	38.7%
Government	7	6.1%	186	6.7%
Labs	3	2.6%	88	3.2%

47.8% of safety people have company roles. The corresponding share in other areas is 38.7%. Affiliations include jobs, board seats and advisory roles, so shares can overlap.

Among safety people, 20 have only nonprofit organizations among their known current roles. 5 have both nonprofit and company roles.

Where are the largest safety groups?

Bars show 8 organizations with the largest counts of current safety people. All organizations tied at the last shown rank are included.

Source: People of Superintelligence biographies and career records; OpenAlex (CC0), as of 18 October 2026. A person counts once per parent organization. Universities are teal, companies ochre, and other types blue.

Data table

Organization	Type	Safety people	All current people tracked	Safety share
Anthropic	Company	11	45	24.4%
METR	Nonprofit	6	6	100.0%
OpenAI	Company	6	41	14.6%
Google	Company	5	173	2.9%
Meta	Company	4	52	7.7%
Machine Intelligence Research Institute	Nonprofit	3	3	100.0%
Stanford University	University	3	65	4.6%
University of California, Berkeley	University	3	39	7.7%

Anthropic has 11 safety people among 45 people with current affiliations that we track (24.4%). These include Adam Jermyn, Adly Templeton and Alex Tamkin.

We count each person once per parent organization, including its labs.

How do frontier labs fit in?

We identify frontier-lab roles for 23 of 115 safety people (20.0%). In other areas, 229 of 2,759 people have these roles (8.3%).

Paired bars compare recorded frontier-lab and big-tech affiliations for safety and other areas.

Source: People of Superintelligence biographies and career records; OpenAlex (CC0), as of 18 October 2026. Organization topics as of 18 October 2026.

Data table

Organization topic	Safety people	Observed safety share	Other people	Observed share in other areas
Frontier AI lab	23	20.0%	229	8.3%
Big tech	11	9.6%	373	13.5%

The frontier-lab category follows each person's listed unit. A person can have both frontier-lab and big-tech roles. Incomplete organization coverage makes these minimum observed shares.