FTX Future Fund

The FTX Future Fund was a philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by the FTX Foundation, the charitable arm of the cryptocurrency empire of Sam Bankman-Fried. Run by Nick Beckstead with the philosopher William MacAskill and a small team, it became the flashiest and most aggressive funder of longtermist, AI-safety, and biosecurity work within the Effective Altruism movement, committing roughly 160 million dollars in its nine months of operation before its entire leadership resigned and the fund collapsed alongside FTX in November 2022. The money was traced to defrauded FTX customers, and the bankruptcy estate later pursued grantees to claw it back.¹²

The February 2022 Launch

The Future Fund was announced in late February 2022 with a declared ambition far larger than its eventual spending: it said it planned to distribute at least 100 million dollars in 2022 and might deploy up to 1 billion dollars that year, drawing on the fortune Bankman-Fried had built at FTX and the trading firm Alameda Research. Its stated areas of interest were the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biological risk, improving institutions, economic growth, great-power relations, and effective altruism itself, an explicitly longtermist agenda focused on improving humanity's long-run prospects. The fund's leadership came directly from the movement's intellectual core: Beckstead, a philosopher who had run the long-term-future grantmaking at Open Philanthropy, served as chief executive, and the team included MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher who had cofounded the movement and personally recruited Bankman-Fried into "earning to give," along with Leopold Aschenbrenner, Avital Balwit, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.¹³

The fund operated through three mechanisms: an open call for applications, staff-led grants drawn from a longlist of priorities, and a regranting program that gave discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. The regranting program was the fund's signature innovation, onboarding more than 100 regrantors with their own budgets plus more than 50 grant recommenders, and the fund set aside more than 100 million dollars for them to deploy over a six-month experiment running from April to October 2022. This structure pushed money out at unusual speed and with unusual decentralization compared with the deliberative pace of Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy.³⁴

The Regranting Program and the Money

By its June 2022 public update the Future Fund reported making 262 grants and investments totaling approximately 132 million dollars. Of that, staff-led grantmaking accounted for about 73 million dollars across 25 grants, the open call had drawn more than 1,700 applications of which 69 were funded for about 26 million dollars, and the regranting program had deployed about 31 million dollars across 168 grants. Broken down by cause, effective altruism had received about 34 million dollars across 61 grants, biorisk about 30 million across 30 grants, artificial intelligence about 20 million across 76 grants, and a program to recruit exceptional people about 10 million across 18 grants. The largest 41 grants, each above 500,000 dollars, accounted for about 109 million dollars of the total.⁴

Over its full run the fund committed on the order of 160 million dollars, well short of the 100-million-to-1-billion ambition it had announced but still a sum that flooded the longtermist and AI-safety field, where many organizations had previously depended on the slower Good Ventures money. Recipients spanned AI-safety research groups, biosecurity projects, academic fellowships, media and recruitment efforts, and forecasting work, and the speed of the deployment meant that by the time FTX failed a large share of the committed money had been paid out and in some cases already spent.¹⁴

The November 2022 Collapse

On November 11, 2022, the same day FTX filed for bankruptcy, the Future Fund's entire team announced its resignation in a post on the EA Forum. Beckstead, Aschenbrenner, Balwit, and Ramakrishnan signed the statement, joined by MacAskill, writing that they were devastated that many committed grants could not be honored, that their hearts went out to the thousands of FTX customers whose finances had been jeopardized or destroyed, and that to the extent FTX leadership had engaged in deception or dishonesty they condemned it in the strongest possible terms. They said they were unable to perform their work or process grants and directed grantees to a reachout address. Bankman-Fried was later convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023 after FTX collapsed with billions of dollars in customer funds missing.²⁵

The collapse left grantees in legal and financial limbo, because the money had originated with an entity now revealed to have been insolvent and, on the government's case, funded by misappropriated customer deposits. A March 2023 TIME investigation reported that effective-altruism leaders had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct years before the failure, fueling the charge that the movement's consequentialist reasoning had helped rationalize his behavior.⁶⁷

The Clawbacks

The FTX bankruptcy estate, represented by the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, moved to recover money transferred before the bankruptcy under preference and fraudulent-conveyance theories, which reach transactions made up to two years before the filing even when the recipient did nothing wrong and had no knowledge of wrongdoing. Future Fund grantees received demand letters seeking repayment, and many returned funds or negotiated settlements rather than litigate in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The episode meant that money the field had treated as a windfall in 2022 became a liability that recipients could be ordered to give back.⁸⁹

The largest single settlement involved Effective Ventures, the umbrella charity housing the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can, which agreed on December 13, 2023 to pay the FTX estate 26,786,503 dollars, an amount equal to 100 percent of the funds its entities had received from FTX and the FTX Foundation in 2022. An independent investigation by the law firm Mintz found no evidence that anyone at Effective Ventures had known of the criminal fraud, and the organization went on to spin its constituent projects out as independent legal entities. Open Philanthropy separately invited grantees harmed by the FTX collapse to apply for replacement funding, partially backfilling commitments the Future Fund could no longer keep.¹⁰¹¹