Holden Karnofsky

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Member of Technical StaffJan 2025 – present
2. 
   Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

   • Visiting ScholarApr 2024 – Jan 2025
3. 
   Open Philanthropy

   • Director of AI StrategyJul 2023 – Apr 2024
   • Co-CEOJun 2021 – Jul 2023
   • Chief Executive OfficerJun 2017 – Jun 2021
   • Project LeadAug 2014 – Jun 2017
4. 
   GiveWell

   • Co-Founder, Co-Executive DirectorJun 2007 – Jun 2017
5. 
   Bridgewater Associates

   • Investment Associate2004–2007

Education

• BA, social studies, Harvard University, 2003

Lesser-known facts

• Studied social studies at Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.
• Once shared an apartment with Dario Amodei.
• Worked at Bridgewater Associates after college, where he and Elie Hassenfeld started a charity club in 2006 to research where to give.
• Quit Bridgewater in 2007 to run GiveWell full time, funded by donations from colleagues.
• Annual donations to GiveWell-recommended charities grew from $1.6 million in 2010 to $110 million in 2015.
• Sat on OpenAI's board of directors from 2017 to 2021.
• Worked with METR in 2023 to develop the idea of responsible scaling policies, then led Anthropic's RSP v3.0 rewrite.
• Named his blog Cold Takes because each post is written at least a month before it is published.

Known for

• Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI, 2012)

Honors

National Merit Scholar

Interviews and talks

• 80,000 Hours podcast #226 on concrete AI safety at frontier AI companies (2025)80000hours.org