--- alias: - Toby Ord - Toby David Godfrey Ord born: 1979 category: AI & Effective Altruism created: 2026-06-19 location: Oxford, England summary: Toby Ord is an Australian moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded Giving What We Can and the effective altruism movement, was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and wrote The Precipice, which argues there is a one-in-six chance humanity suffers an existential catastrophe this century. tags: - Person - EffectiveAltruism - Longtermism - Oxford - ExistentialRisk - FutureOfHumanityInstitute updated: 2026-06-19 --- Toby Ord (born July 1979) is an Australian moral philosopher at the University of Oxford who cofounded the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) movement and became one of the leading academic theorists of existential risk. He founded Giving What We Can, the pledge society that anchored the movement's early growth, was a senior research fellow at the [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/), and wrote *The Precipice*, a 2020 book arguing that humanity faces a roughly one-in-six chance of an existential catastrophe within the next hundred years.[^1][^2] ### Giving What We Can Ord was born in Melbourne and studied computer science before switching to philosophy at the University of Melbourne, then moved to Oxford for graduate work. There he calculated that he could earn roughly 1.5 million pounds over his career and give away about a million of it while keeping a graduate student's standard of living, and he pledged to donate everything above a fixed personal income. In 2009 he and the philosopher [William MacAskill](/people/william-macaskill/) founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge at least ten percent of their income to the most cost-effective charities; its members have collectively pledged well over a billion dollars. The pledge model, paired with the charity-evaluation work of [GiveWell](/organizations/givewell/) and [Holden Karnofsky](/people/holden-karnofsky/), formed the practical core of effective altruism.[^3][^4] Ord launched Giving What We Can in November 2009 alongside his wife, the physician Bernadette Young, with whom he committed to capping his own annual spending and donating the rest. He set his personal living allowance at about 18,000 pounds a year, giving away everything earned above it toward a lifetime target of one million pounds, with the bulk going to the SCI Foundation and Deworm the World (both deworming programs), the Against Malaria Foundation, and the poverty-research lab J-PAL. The society grew from a handful of Oxford members to more than 9,000, and by March 2022 the pledges of its members totaled more than 2.5 billion dollars in expected lifetime giving.[^3][^7] ### Future of Humanity Institute and Existential Risk Ord was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Oxford center founded by [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/) in 2005 that became the academic headquarters of longtermism. His research moved from the ethics of global poverty toward existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential, the same focus that animated Bostrom's work and the AI-safety concerns of the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/). Ord has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister's Office.[^1][^2] The Future of Humanity Institute closed on April 16, 2024 after nineteen years, with Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy declining to renew the remaining staff contracts following a 2020 freeze on its hiring and fundraising; Bostrom called it "death by bureaucracy." The shutdown followed a period of reputational damage, including the 2023 resurfacing of a 1996 email in which Bostrom had used a racial slur, for which he apologized and which prompted an Oxford inquiry. Ord had by then moved to the Oxford Martin School's AI Governance Initiative, continuing the existential-risk work the institute had housed.[^8][^9] ### The Precipice *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity*, published in 2020, surveyed the catastrophes that could end the human story, natural and anthropogenic, and assigned probabilities to each. Ord judged engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence the gravest near-term threats and estimated the combined chance of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six. The book argued that reducing such risks should rank among the highest global priorities, the central claim of the longtermist program that MacAskill later developed in *What We Owe the Future* and that the [FTX Future Fund](/organizations/ftx-future-fund/) of [Sam Bankman-Fried](/people/sam-bankman-fried/) funded before its 2022 collapse.[^5][^6] Ord's Table 6.1 gave per-century estimates that placed unaligned artificial intelligence at roughly one in ten, engineered pandemics at one in thirty, nuclear war and climate change at one in a thousand each, and all natural risks combined (asteroids, supervolcanoes, naturally arising pandemics) at only about one in ten thousand. He stressed that the anthropogenic figures were order-of-magnitude judgments that could "easily be a factor of 3 higher or lower," and that the era of human-made existential risk had begun only with the atomic bomb in 1945, which he called the start of the "Precipice." His framing of AI as the single largest source of extinction risk became a load-bearing premise for the AI-safety funding that flowed from [Open Philanthropy](/organizations/open-philanthropy/) and the FTX Future Fund into the labs and research centers.[^2][^10] [^1]: "Toby Ord," Giving What We Can profile, on the Oxford position, the Future of Humanity Institute fellowship, and advisory roles. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/people/toby-ord [^2]: Ord, Toby. *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.* Bloomsbury, 2020. [^3]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the career-earnings calculation and the pledge. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11950843 [^4]: "Our history," Giving What We Can, on the 2009 founding with William MacAskill and the cumulative pledge total. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history [^5]: "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, on the one-in-six estimate and the book's argument. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-precipice-existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity/ [^6]: "Existential risk and the future of humanity (Toby Ord)," EA Forum, on the book's risk taxonomy and probability estimates. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BAfEgTaK5BsperQEc/existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity-toby-ord [^7]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the 18,000-pound living allowance and the named charities; "Oxford-based charity receives more than $2.5 billion in pledges," University of Oxford, March 1, 2022. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-03-01-oxford-based-charity-receives-more-25-billion-pledges-community-effective-givers [^8]: "Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher," *The Guardian,* April 20, 2024, on the April 16, 2024 closure and "death by bureaucracy." https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/04/20/oxford-shuts-down-elon-musk-funded-future-of-humanity-institute/ [^9]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the 2020 hiring freeze, the contract non-renewals, and the institute's nineteen-year run. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute [^10]: "Some thoughts on Toby Ord's existential risk estimates," EA Forum, reproducing Table 6.1 with the one-in-ten AI figure and the order-of-magnitude caveat. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z5KZ2cui8WDjyF6gJ/some-thoughts-on-toby-ord-s-existential-risk-estimates