Caleb Watney

Caleb Watney received a bachelor of business administration from Sterling College and a master's degree in economics from George Mason University, where he was a graduate research fellow at the Mercatus Center. He was a technology policy fellow at the R Street Institute and director of innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.¹²

Institute for Progress

Watney co-founded the Institute for Progress (IFP) with Alec Stapp in 2021 and served as its co-chief executive until 2026, overseeing its metascience, high-skilled immigration and emerging technology policy teams.¹ Their founding essay of January 20, 2022 borrowed "a framework ... from the effective altruism community" of prioritizing issues "that are important, neglected, and tractable."³ Open Philanthropy (later renamed Coefficient Giving)⁴ gave IFP 1.6 million dollars in October 2021 and 9 million dollars in March 2023.⁵ IFP's returns report Watney's pay as 54,231 dollars for 2021, 163,125 dollars for 2022, 202,500 dollars for 2023 and 240,362 dollars for 2024.⁶ In October 2023 he testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on federal AI research funding; his IFP work included papers on "X-Labs" for AI-driven science, a response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy on a national AI research and development plan, and, with Tim Hwang, a response to a DARPA request for information on shaping emerging technologies.¹

Coefficient Giving

On July 9, 2026, Coefficient Giving announced that Watney had joined as its "inaugural managing director of public policy," overseeing "our work on U.S. AI policy, our Abundance & Growth Fund, and government relations." It wrote: "We were an early supporter of IFP and think they have an incredible track record of counterfactual policy impact." Watney said: "Coefficient Giving took an early bet on IFP as we were just getting off the ground, and now I'm excited to help scale what we learned across the broader policy ecosystem." He said that "AI may be the most consequential technology transition in modern history," and that he was "equally excited to reunite with my former IFP colleague Matt Clancy on the Abundance & Growth Fund." Clancy, the fund's program director, said there were "very few people with such extensive national policymaking expertise bridging frontier AI and the work we do at the Abundance & Growth Fund."²

The announcement stated that Luke Muehlhauser "previously ran the U.S. AI policy portfolio as part of his 'AI Governance & Policy' team. He helped recruit Caleb to take U.S. AI policy off his plate, and Luke has renamed his team 'AI Governance & International Policy' to make the distinction with Caleb's team clear," adding that "our hope is for Caleb to own all of it over time." Watney was building "a team of grantmakers, operators, and policy entrepreneurs to work on U.S. AI policy."² He remained on IFP's board, whose other external members were Dan Correa of the Federation of American Scientists, Zachary Graves of the Foundation for American Innovation and Tamara Winter of Stripe Press; IFP listed Clancy, identified as of Coefficient Giving, among its non-resident senior fellows.⁷