Luke Muehlhauser

Luke Muehlhauser was the grant investigator for Open Philanthropy's 55-million-dollar grant of January 2019 to Georgetown University that launched the Center for Security and Emerging Technology under the former IARPA director Jason Matheny, with Helen Toner, formerly of Open Philanthropy, on its founding team.¹ After Matheny became chief executive of the RAND Corporation, Muehlhauser, described by Open Philanthropy as the person "who leads our grantmaking on AI governance," recommended its gift of 10.5 million dollars in October 2023, which followed an April 2023 gift, "to be spent at the discretion of RAND president and CEO Jason Matheny."²

In October 2023 Politico reported that Muehlhauser, "Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI governance and policy," was one of the four members of the board of Anthropic, in which Open Philanthropy's funder Dustin Moskovitz had invested.³ He resigned from the board on May 28, 2024. In a post of June 12, 2024, he wrote that "it became increasingly complicated over time for me to simultaneously be (a) an AI governance grantmaker at Open Philanthropy (my day job), where we support a wide variety of organizations including some who work on US AI policy, and (b) a Board member at a US-based frontier AI company (though I've never held any Anthropic equity)," and that the resignation was not safety-related.⁴