What are you working on?

Mox is San Francisco's primary AI safety incubator and Effective Altruism community space. We’ve hosted hundreds of members and thousands of visitors, organized our own public events and fellowships, and supported dozens of other impactful orgs in theirs.

Much about Mox can be found on our public fundraiser (posted in March 2026): https://manifund.org/projects/mox-2026-fundraiser.

Since then, we've hosted:

• Mox Summer Season, public talks with Thomas Larsen (AI 2040), Robin Hanson, Goodfire, Epoch, and events with Bluedot, EA SF, and Sentient Futures
• Surplus, a new incubator for software startups across EA & AI safety
• Sentient Futures Residency, offering a 50% discount to establish animal welfare in SF
• (continued) Guest Program for complimentary drop-in access to aligned orgs
• (continued) J-1 Global Expert Fellowships to help researchers & founders immigrate to SF
• Preparing for the Iliad Intensive and Frame Fellowship batch 2, in the fall
• Renovating our first floor, to feature an open-to-public events space and coworking (perhaps, a cafe)

What would you do with funding?

We'd like to hire more staff (especially, a fulltime director, plus 1-2 more program/ops staff), and incubate more fellowships, incubators, events, and new orgs. We expect $2m would provide us 12-18mo of runway, allowing us to focus on longterm, mission-aligned projects rather than chasing after rent from local tech startups to cover our bills.

Specific new initiatives we'd like to pursue, some more speculative than others:

• Big Events: eg 200-1000 person events every week, such as an AI Safety Expo or Film Festival
• Clubs at Mox: push towards big-tent EA, with ~10 clubs of 5-30 folks meeting weekly across different cause areas
• "Mox Media": longform guides on establishing an AI safety org like Stripe Atlas; best-in-class talk recordings + promotion such as Joe Carlsmith's
• Research at Mox: establish an in-house institution for more fundamental research, perhaps on AI rights/welfare/deals with AIs

Mox currently burns about ~$200k/quarter (+200k/q in revenue against -400k/q in costs; see this historical breakdown). At this rate, Mox has between 3-6mo of runway. That runway figure is kind of fake, in that Mox has had 3-6mo of runway continuously over the last year; if necessary, Manifund (or Austin personally) are prepared to backstop Mox operations. But we do expect costs to rise in the short term, as we've renewed our lease at a higher rate to cover all 4 floors (40k sq ft) and provide a higher level of service.

We've run Mox in a fairly lean manner, estimating costs at $1k/mo per working member; our best guess is that eg Constellation spends 3-6x this amount (not including food).