Humanity AI is a pooled philanthropic vehicle launched in October 2025 as a five-year, $500 million commitment from ten US foundations. Co-chairs are Omidyar Network and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; founding members are the Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Kapor Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Siegel Family Endowment, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serves as fiscal sponsor and runs the pooled fund operationally, with a hired executive director.
The May 12, 2026 announcement was Humanity AI's first grant round. The structure is $8 million in cohort grants of $500,000 each to nine named organizations, $3 million for an AI Civics program led by Data + Society with the Digital Public Library of America, and a forthcoming $10 million open call for additional civil-society grantees. Cohort recipients are AI Now Institute, Center for Democracy and Technology, Student Defense (SHAPE AI), Council on Foreign Relations LEAD AI, Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute, Kinfolk Tech, Partnership on AI, Pulitzer Center, and TechEquity. Stated thematic priorities are safeguarding democratic institutions, protecting workers' rights, strengthening journalism, and supporting education.
The grantee mix is concentrated on civil-society AI research and advocacy rather than technical alignment work. AI Now Institute and DAIR are policy research groups led respectively by Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, and Timnit Gebru. Partnership on AI is a multistakeholder convening body; CDT and CFR LEAD AI focus on policy. Pulitzer Center's funding ties to journalism on AI. The TechEquity and Kinfolk Tech grants are oriented toward worker rights and community organizing.
Within the open-source AI stack the round sits at governance, with secondary attribution at data (DAIR's data-curation and dataset-documentation work) and evaluation (AI Now's audit-and-accountability research). The pooled-fund structure makes Humanity AI a coordinated counterweight to single-foundation civil-society funding in the AI space.
Recipient
9+ inaugural grantee organizations (AI Now Institute, Center for Democracy and Technology, Council on Foreign Relations LEAD AI, DAIR Institute, Partnership on AI, TechEquity, Kinfolk Tech, Pulitzer Center, Student Defense, plus AI Civics)
Funder
Humanity AI Coalition · consortium · US
$500M five-year pooled philanthropic initiative across Mellon, Ford, MacArthur, Mozilla, Omidyar, Packard, Doris Duke, Lumina, Kapor, Siegel ensuring AI serves the public interest.