--- alias: - FHI category: Private Organization created: 2026-06-19 location: Oxford, England summary: The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024. tags: - Organization - FutureOfHumanityInstitute - Longtermism - ArtificialIntelligence - EffectiveAltruism - Transhumanism - Oxford updated: 2026-06-19 --- The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Oxford, founded in 2005 by the philosopher [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/) and closed by the university on April 16, 2024. For nearly two decades it was the academic headquarters of longtermism and of the study of existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential. Its personnel and arguments seeded the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) movement, and its work on artificial-intelligence risk reinforced the doom thesis that runs through the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/) and the AI-safety organizations [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) funded.[^1][^2] ### Research and Personnel FHI sat within Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School and worked on existential risk, AI safety, human enhancement, global catastrophic risk, and the anthropic reasoning Bostrom had formalized. Its researchers overlapped almost entirely with the founding figures of effective altruism: [Toby Ord](/people/toby-ord/), who founded Giving What We Can, and [William MacAskill](/people/william-macaskill/), who later wrote the longtermist book *What We Owe the Future*, were associated with the institute and the adjacent Oxford effective-altruism organizations, and the futurist Anders Sandberg was a long-serving senior fellow. The institute functioned as the scholarly counterpart to the Bay Area rationalist scene around the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/).[^1][^3] The institute was established in 2005 on a three-year initial term and ran for nineteen years. Its output included Bostrom's *Superintelligence* and the formalization of "existential risk," Ord's 2020 book *The Precipice*, and influential papers on the "unilateralist's curse," the "vulnerable world hypothesis," and the simulation argument, alongside early technical AI-governance work that fed the policy conversation later taken up by the [Future of Life Institute](/organizations/future-of-life-institute/) and government bodies. The historian of the milieu noted that FHI operated less as a conventional department than as a research collective of philosophers, mathematicians, and computer scientists working on questions most academic institutions regarded as speculative.[^6] ### Funding FHI drew support from technology philanthropy aligned with its longtermist mission. [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/), whom Bostrom's *Superintelligence* had influenced, funded AI-safety work in the institute's orbit, and the institute and its affiliated projects received money from [Open Philanthropy](/organizations/open-philanthropy/) and, before its 2022 collapse, the [FTX Future Fund](/organizations/ftx-future-fund/) established by [Sam Bankman-Fried](/people/sam-bankman-fried/). The funding tied Oxford academic longtermism to the same donor base that capitalized the effective-altruism and AI-safety infrastructure.[^2][^4] The reliance on a small number of mission-aligned donors became a structural problem once Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy froze the institute's fundraising in 2020, leaving it unable to bring in new money or replace departing staff. The collapse of the FTX Future Fund in November 2022, when Bankman-Fried's exchange failed and the fund's grant commitments evaporated, cut off a major prospective source for longtermist research across the field and deepened the reputational crisis that surrounded the institute in its final eighteen months. The institute's dependence on the effective-altruism donor base meant its fortunes tracked that movement's standing rather than ordinary university funding cycles.[^4][^6] ### Closure The institute shut down on April 16, 2024, after years of administrative conflict with the Oxford philosophy faculty, including a freeze on hiring and fundraising. Bostrom left the university. The closure followed the reputational damage of Bostrom's 2023 admission of a 1990s racist email and the wider discrediting of effective altruism after the FTX fraud, and it removed longtermism's principal academic institution at the moment the movement was under its heaviest public scrutiny.[^5] The institute's website was replaced on the closure date by a four-paragraph statement attributing the shutdown to "increasing administrative headwinds" from the Faculty of Philosophy. The Faculty had decided in late 2023 not to renew the contracts of the remaining staff, and Bostrom described the outcome to *The Guardian* as a "death by bureaucracy." Bostrom founded a successor organization, the nonprofit Macrostrategy Research Initiative, to continue the work outside Oxford. Several former staff dispersed to other existential-risk bodies, including the [Centre for the Study of Existential Risk](/organizations/centre-for-the-study-of-existential-risk/) at Cambridge and independent AI-governance groups, but no institution replaced FHI's role as the field's academic center.[^5][^6] [^1]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014, and the Future of Humanity Institute research record, 2005 to 2024. [^2]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo [^3]: "Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century," *Jacobin,* January 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/effective-altruism-longtermism-nick-bostrom-racism [^4]: "Effective Altruism After Sam Bankman-Fried," Seven Pillars Institute, 2023. https://www.sevenpillarsinstitute.org/effective-altruism-after-sam-bankman-fried/ [^5]: "The future of the future of humanity," Émile P. Torres, on the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute, 2024. https://xriskology.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-future-of-humanity [^6]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the institute's 2005 founding, nineteen-year run, research output, the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision, the April 16, 2024 closure statement, and the "death by bureaucracy" account; Bostrom subsequently founded the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute