Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a foreign-policy research institution headquartered at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., which describes itself as the oldest international-affairs think tank in the United States.¹² It was founded in 1910 with a gift of 10 million dollars from Andrew Carnegie, then, in its words, "one of the richest people in the world after the sale of Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan," who sought to "hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization."¹

History

In 1945 the former Carnegie president James T. Shotwell led a delegation of advisers to the conference that drafted the United Nations charter and persuaded the U.S. delegation to add an amendment establishing the permanent UN Commission on Human Rights. From the 1970s the endowment built a program on reducing nuclear risks and became, in its own description, "the premier authoritative source of expertise on nonproliferation." Before the Iraq War it convened a working group on a weapons-inspection regime, several of whose recommendations were incorporated in UN Resolution 1441. A Middle Class Task Force launched in 2018 produced a report that, the endowment states, "helped form the basis of President Joe Biden's reinvigorated foreign policy."¹

Besides its Washington and California offices it runs centers in Asia, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels and New Delhi: Carnegie China; Carnegie Europe, founded in 2007; Carnegie India, founded in April 2016; the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, founded in 2006; and the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. It lists "over 200 experts" and states that it conducts "strategic dialogues and back-channel diplomacy" and that its scholars "have served in nearly every administration since the endowment's founding." Its trustees have included Dwight Eisenhower, Elihu Root, John Foster Dulles, Nicholas Murray Butler, Bill Bradley, Robert Zoellick, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Penny Pritzker.¹

Presidents

William Burns, who had retired from the Foreign Service in 2014 after serving as deputy secretary of state, was president from 2015 to 2021.² Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California who had served on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, was president from November 2021 to June 2026. His Carnegie biography lists him as a director of Inflection AI, Harvard University and LawZero and as a trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, which he joined in January 2026 while still president. On August 4, 2026, Anthropic announced that he would join it as its first chief global affairs officer.³⁴⁵

AI Governance

In March 2022 Open Philanthropy recommended 597,717 dollars over two years to the endowment "to support a research project on international AI governance led by Matt Sheehan," under its focus area "Potential Risks from Advanced AI." The same grant page listed another Open Philanthropy grant of 613,380 dollars over three years to the endowment for a project on "Chinese and Indian Perspectives on Biotech Security Risks."⁶ Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow in the Asia Program and co-director of the China AI Initiative, lived and worked in China from 2010 to 2016 and was previously a fellow at MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute.⁷

On April 29, 2024, Holden Karnofsky announced that he had left Open Philanthropy to join Carnegie as a visiting scholar and would "analyze and write about topics relevant to AI risk reduction," while continuing to serve on Open Philanthropy's board. He wrote that Cuéllar "has been an advocate for taking (what I see as) the biggest risks from AI seriously," that "Carnegie is looking to increase its attention to AI risk," and that its scholars on the subject included Sheehan, "who specializes in China's AI ecosystem." He cited among his reasons for leaving Open Philanthropy "the fact that I'm married to the President of a major AI company," Daniela Amodei of Anthropic.⁴ He joined Anthropic in January 2025.⁸