AI Safety Ecosystem Research notes

These are some personal notes taken and later dressed up a bit to make into a post. Dunno how much value is here for people already familiar with the AI Safety Ecosystem.Over several weeks in the spring of 2026 I attempted to map out the entire AI Safety ecosystem as a project for MATS Research. This entailed finding every organization working on AI Safety (whether it be via research, policy, pipeline, or other methods) and determining (or estimating) their headcount and annual spending. It’s a snapshot, catching a period of time just before the incoming flood of 2026 funding. We worked almost entirely from public information.I believe MATS will be publishing the results in a formal report later this year. I will leave the unveiling of our findings to them. However while I was doing this research I stumbled across various orgs or tidbits that made me think “Huh, that’s interesting!”I’m not an insider here (or at least, I’m a periphery insider if anything) so many of these things may be old hat to people in the know. But they were interesting enough for me to jot down for my own notes, so I’m sharing them here. I was surprised by a number of things I found.MATS paid for the many hours that the collection of all this data took, and they own the resulting dataset. This post is not endorsed by MATS or representative of their views in any way. I worked as an independent contractor, and the following opinions are entirely my own. These are just thoughts that struck me while working, not things that are in the dataset or will impact the final report. So if an opinion below is bad, it’s on me. XDHuman Line Project is an organization that collects stories of AI Psychosis. It keeps these in some sort of repository, shares some of them, and presumably does advocacy work.When I think “AI Safety” I think “stop the extinction or disempowerment of the human species” first, and “stop the disintegration of freedom and life as we know it” second. It didn’t occur to me that groups wou