# What’s wrong with grantmaking? > Source: > Published: 2026-07-08 23:51:10+00:00 *I’m currently working on a **BlueDot AI Safety Grantmaking Fundamentals course**, and in the process of recruiting grantmakers for curriculum development, I’ve been having chats with several people thinking about field strategy. The following is inspired by a conversation with Evan Miyazono from **Atlas Computing** (more on Atlas below).* In this post, I’ll be attempting to address four questions: Passive grantmaking = evaluating proposals. A grantmaker has to evaluate incoming proposals along two axes: **Some notes on the above:** Passive grantmaking forces every applicant to have both skills. It doesn’t need to. Active grantmaking is when a grantmaker: Problems with the above: AI safety grantmakers are [very very busy](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AsxgoXZsuEEX6br6f/what-it-s-like-to-be-an-ai-safety-grantmaker-and-why-we-need) The above assumes that you happen to know people who would be a good fit for your project at all. The key to optimizing grantmaking is *specialization: *separating project proposals from people– separating evaluations of project value from applicant fit. Two case studies: **1. The Institute For Progress (IFP)** IFP’s [Launch Sequence](https://ifp.org/rfp-launch/) is an open call for project proposals “that prepare the world for advanced AI.” They write: “You should submit a proposal if you have a good idea, even if you don’t expect to be the person actually leading or working on the resulting project… If your proposal is selected, we’ll work closely with you to develop the idea into a concrete project plan, publish your plan, connect you with philanthropic funders, and help you headhunt for a project lead or co-lead.” If you’re interested in engaging in field strategy work part-time, consider **authoring a proposal or offering ideas to IFP. **They pay a[ $10,000 honorarium](https://ifp.org/the-launch-sequence/) for published proposals and $1,000 bounties for ideas they publish. In effect, IFP treats field strategy as freelance work: anyone can contribute an idea, get paid, and walk away. Atlas Computing, Evan Miyazono’s organization, is betting on the opposite model: field strategy as a full-time job. **2. Atlas Computing** Evan in [this post](https://blog.atlascomputing.org/p/if-your-problem-is-structural-you) discusses his plans to make Atlas a hub that “rais[es] funding to gather and support [field strategists]” to address “[t]he problems that don’t fit neatly into any existing fiefdom.” He writes: “[These orphaned problems] need someone whose job it is to find them, scope them, and make it easy for the right person to step in and solve them.” If you’re interested in being a Field Strategist in a more official capacity than what IFP’s Launch Sequence offers, Atlas Computing’s job listing is [here](https://atlascomputing.org/jobs/field-strategist.pdf). If you’re interested in supporting Atlas’s work, you can also email [evan@atlascomputing.org](mailto:evan@atlascomputing.org). How might we scale this approach to major funders? Here are a couple of ideas: In sum, the grantmaking pipeline currently requires three distinct jobs: Today, all three are combined into a single application. Applicants must diagnose the field, design a project, and nominate themselves to execute it. Grantmakers must then evaluate all three at once. It doesn’t need to be this way. Field strategists and scoping processes like IFP’s can own jobs one and two; application evaluation can then shrink to job three alone: can this person run this plan? Photo by [Brecht Corbeel](https://unsplash.com/@brechtcorbeel) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com) AI safety is facing **an unprecedented wave of funding **with the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. As I’ve [written previously](https://thecounterfactual.substack.com/p/the-anthropic-ipo-is-coming-we-arent): When [Anthropic IPOs], a few thousand people, including some of the wealthiest people on the planet, will become liquid, and a meaningful fraction of those people will want to give to AI safety. No philanthropic field this young, with this little absorptive capacity, has ever successfully channeled a funding influx this large. The closest precedents ended badly. We need a radically different approach to deploying capital if we want to be the first to pull it off.