Redwood Research

Redwood Research is a Berkeley, California nonprofit that conducts AI alignment research. Its legal name is Redwood Research Group Inc, EIN 87-1702255, a 501(c)(3) whose tax exemption dates from September 1, 2021, filing in care of Nathaniel Thomas at 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1200, Berkeley.¹ Announcing the group on October 6, 2021, Nate Thomas wrote: "Redwood Research is a longtermist research lab focusing on applied AI alignment. We're led by Nate Thomas (CEO), Buck Shlegeris (CTO), and Bill Zito (COO/software engineer); our board is Nate, Paul Christiano and Holden Karnofsky. We currently have ten people on staff."² Karnofsky was then co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, which recommended its first grants to Redwood the following month and had given it 62.52 million dollars by the end of 2025.³⁴⁵⁶⁷

Board and Officers

On Redwood's first return, for 2021, Nathaniel Thomas was chief executive and president, Michael Shlegeris (Buck Shlegeris) chief technology officer and William Zito chief operating officer, each paid 56,250 dollars; Holden Karnofsky was treasurer and Paul Christiano secretary, both unpaid. For 2022 the return listed Karnofsky as treasurer and CFO and Christiano as secretary, both unpaid, with Thomas as chairperson and president at 274,361 dollars and the highest-paid employee, the member of technical staff Daniel Ziegler, at 384,872 dollars. The return for 2023 listed Christiano as a director "thru 6/23" and Karnofsky as a director "thru 11/23," with Ajeya Cotra as a director, Shlegeris as chief executive and director, and Thomas as director and board chair.¹⁸ Cotra was then Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for "Potential Risks from Advanced AI," leading its "grantmaking on technical research that could help to clarify and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI."⁹ The return for 2024 listed Cotra as a director "thru 8/24," Ammon Bartram as a director, Ryan Greenblatt as chief scientist at 314,922 dollars, and Shlegeris as chief executive at 272,164 dollars.⁸

Christiano left the board in June 2023. In April 2024 the Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, named him head of AI safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.¹⁰ In July 2023 Karnofsky's Open Philanthropy title changed from co-CEO to director of AI strategy; he left Redwood's board in November 2023, left Open Philanthropy's staff for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on April 29, 2024, and joined Anthropic, whose president Daniela Amodei is his wife, in January 2025.¹¹¹²

Open Philanthropy Grants

Open Philanthropy recommended "four grants totaling $9,420,000 to Redwood Research for general support" in November 2021, describing it as "a new research institution that conducts research to better understand and make progress on AI alignment in order to improve the long-run future." The grant investigator was Nick Beckstead, who had joined Open Philanthropy in 2014 and was its program officer for global catastrophic risks, and the page noted that "Redwood Research staff also reviewed this page prior to publication."³¹³ By the February 2022 launch of the FTX Future Fund, financed by Sam Bankman-Fried, Beckstead was its chief executive.¹⁴ Open Philanthropy followed with 10.7 million dollars "over 18 months" in August 2022, 5.3 million dollars in June 2023, 1.1 million dollars in May 2025 "to support collaborations with external researchers working on technical AI safety projects," and 36 million dollars in November 2025.⁴⁵⁶⁷ None of the four archived grant pages for 2021 to 2025 mentions Karnofsky, Christiano or a board relationship; Open Philanthropy's 2017 page for its 30-million-dollar grant to OpenAI had disclosed that Christiano and Dario Amodei were technical advisers who lived in Karnofsky's house.³⁴⁵⁶¹⁵

Redwood reported contributions of 13.9 million dollars for 2021, 11.97 million for 2022 and 9.4 million for 2023. Its expenses were 2.34 million dollars in 2021, 12.76 million in 2022 and 12.59 million in 2023, and its total assets fell from 14.52 million dollars at the end of 2021 to 11.98 million at the end of 2023.¹

Constellation

On Redwood's return for 2022, James Bregan was listed as "Head of Constellation Operations," paid 234,234 dollars.⁸ The Constellation Institute, EIN 93-2465256, a 501(c)(3) with a tax exemption dated January 1, 2024, files from the same address as Redwood, 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1200, Berkeley. Its return for 2023 listed Nathaniel Thomas as chief executive, Bregan as secretary and treasurer, William Zito as president, and Eli Rose and Tyler Storlie as directors; the compensation it paid Thomas (91,091 dollars), Bregan (103,953 dollars) and Zito (50,341 dollars) matches the "related organization" compensation reported for the same three men on Redwood's return for that year, and Redwood's own payments to them (183,333, 145,833 and 78,138 dollars) appear as related-organization pay on Constellation's. Constellation reported 4.9 million dollars in contributions for 2023. Its return for 2024 listed Thomas as chief executive "thru 7/24" and Zito as president "thru 11/24."⁸¹⁶

Later Work

In July 2026 OpenAI brought in Redwood Research to analyze an AI-agent attack on Hugging Face.⁷