Summary

The goal of this post is to analyze the growth of the technical and non-technical AI safety fields in terms of the number of organizations and number of FTEs working in these fields.

In 2022, I estimated that there were about 300 FTEs (full-time equivalents) working in the field of technical AI safety research and 100 on non-technical AI safety work (400 in total).

Based on updated data and estimates from 2025, I estimate that there are now approximately 600 FTEs working on technical AI safety and 500 FTEs working on non-technical AI safety (1100 in total).

Note that this post is an updated version of my old 2022 post Estimating the Current and Future Number of AI Safety Researchers.

Technical AI safety field growth analysis

The first step for analyzing the growth of the technical AI safety field is to create a spreadsheet listing the names of known technical AI safety organizations, when they were founded, and an estimated number of FTEs for each organization. The technical AI safety dataset contains 70 organizations working on technical AI safety and a total of 629 FTEs working at them (67 active organizations and 604 active FTEs in 2025).

Then I created two scatter plots showing the number of technical AI safety research organizations and FTEs working at them respectively. On each graph, the x-axis is the years from 2010 to 2025 and the y-axis is the number of active organizations or estimated number of total FTEs working at those organizations. I also created models to fit the scatter plots. For the technical AI safety organizations and FTE graphs, I found that an exponential model fit the data best.

Figure 1: Scatter plot showing estimates for the number of technical AI safety research organizations by year from 2010 to 2025 with an exponential curve to fit the data.

Figure 2: Scatter plot showing the estimated number of technical AI safety FTEs by year from 2010 to 2025 with an exponential curve to fit the data.

The two graphs show relatively slow growth from 2010 to 2020 and then the number of technical AI safety organizations and FTEs starts to rapidly increase around 2020 and continues rapidly growing until today (2025).

The exponential models describe a 24% annual growth rate in the number of technical AI safety organizations and a 21% growth rate in the number of technical AI safety FTEs.

I also created graphs showing the number of technical AI safety organizations and FTEs by category. The top three categories by number of organizations and FTEs are Misc technical AI safety research, LLM safety, and interpretability.

Misc technical AI safety research is a broad category that mostly consists of empirical AI safety research that is not purely focused on LLM safety research such as scalable oversight, adversarial robustness, jailbreaks, and otherwise research that covers a variety of different areas and is difficult to put into a single category.

Figure 3: Number of technical AI safety organizations in each category in every year from 2010 - 2025.

Figure 4: Estimated number of technical AI safety FTEs in each category in each year from 2010 - 2025.

Non-technical AI safety field growth analysis

I also applied the same analysis to a dataset of non-technical AI safety organizations. The non-technical AI safety landscape, which includes fields like AI policy, governance, and advocacy, has also expanded significantly. The non-technical AI safety dataset contains 49 organizations working on non-technical AI safety and a total of 500 FTEs working at them.

The graphs plotting the growth of the non-technical AI safety field show an acceleration in the rate of growth around 2023 though a linear model fits the data well from the years 2010 - 2025.

The linear models describe an approximately 30% annual growth rate in the number of non-technical AI safety organizations and FTEs.

Figure 5: Scatter plot showing estimates for the number of non-technical AI safety organizations by year from 2010 to 2025 with a linear model to fit the data.

Figure 6: Scatter plot showing the estimated number of non-technical AI safety FTEs by year from 2010 to 2025 with a linear curve to fit the data.

In the previous post from 2022, I counted 45 researchers on Google Scholar with the AI governance tag. There are now over 300 researchers with the AI governance tag, evidence that the field has grown.

I also created graphs showing the number of non-technical AI safety organizations and FTEs by category.

Figure 7: Number of non-technical AI safety organizations in each category in every year from 2010 - 2025.

Figure 8: Estimated number of non-technical AI safety FTEs in each category in each year from 2010 - 2025.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ryan Kidd from MATS for sharing data on AI safety organizations which was useful for writing this post.

Appendix

A Colab notebook for reproducing the graphs in this post can be found here.
Technical AI safety organizations spreadsheet in Google Sheets.
Non-Technical AI safety organizations spreadsheet in Google Sheets.

Old and new dataset and model comparison

The following graph shows the difference between the old dataset and model from the Estimating the Current and Future Number of AI Safety Researchers (2022) post compared with the updated dataset and model.

The old model is the blue line and the new model is the orange line.

The old model predicts a value of 484 active technical FTEs in 2025 and the true value is 604. The percentage error between the predicted and true value is ~20%.

Technical AI safety organizations table

Name	Founded	Year of Closure	Category	FTEs
Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)	2000	2024	Agent foundations	10
Future of Humanity Institute (FHI)	2005	2024	Misc technical AI safety research	10
Google DeepMind	2010		Misc technical AI safety research	30
GoodAI	2014		Misc technical AI safety research	5
Jacob Steinhardt research group	2016		Misc technical AI safety research	9
David Krueger (Cambridge)	2016		RL safety	15
Center for Human-Compatible AI	2016		RL safety	10
OpenAI	2016		LLM safety	15
Truthful AI (Owain Evans)	2016		LLM safety	3
CORAL	2017		Agent foundations	2
Scott Niekum (University of Massachusetts Amherst)	2018		RL safety	4
Eleuther AI	2020		LLM safety	5
NYU He He research group	2021		LLM safety	4
MIT Algorithmic Alignment Group (Dylan Hadfield-Menell)	2021		LLM safety	10
Anthropic	2021		Interpretability	40
Redwood Research	2021		AI control	10
Alignment Research Center (ARC)	2021		Theoretical AI safety research	4
Lakera	2021		AI security	3
MATS	2021		Misc technical AI safety research	20
Constellation	2021		Misc technical AI safety research	18
NYU Alignment Research Group (Sam Bowman)	2022	2024	LLM safety	5
Center for AI Safety (CAIS)	2022		Misc technical AI safety research	5
Fund for Alignment Research (FAR)	2022		Misc technical AI safety research	15
Conjecture	2022		Misc technical AI safety research	10
Aligned AI	2022		Misc technical AI safety research	2
Epoch AI	2022		AI forecasting	5
AI Safety Student Team (Harvard)	2022		LLM safety	5
Tegmark Group	2022		Interpretability	5
David Bau Interpretability Group	2022		Interpretability	12
Apart Research	2022		Misc technical AI safety research	30
Dovetail Research	2022		Agent foundations	5
PIBBSS	2022		Interdisciplinary	5
METR	2023		Evals	31
Apollo Research	2023		Evals	19
Timaeus	2023		Interpretability	8
London Initiative for AI Safety (LISA) and related programs	2023		Misc technical AI safety research	10
Cadenza Labs	2023		LLM safety	3
Realm Labs	2023		AI security	6
ACS	2023		Interdisciplinary	5
Meaning Alignment Institute	2023		Value learning	3
Orthogonal	2023		Agent foundations	1
AI Security Institute (AISI)	2023		Evals	50
Shi Feng research group (George Washington University)	2024		LLM safety	3
Virtue AI	2024		AI security	3
Goodfire	2024		Interpretability	29
Gray Swan AI	2024		AI security	3
Transluce	2024		Interpretability	15
Guide Labs	2024		Interpretability	4
Aether research	2024		LLM safety	3
Simplex	2024		Interpretability	2
Contramont Research	2024		LLM safety	3
Tilde	2024		Interpretability	5
Palisade Research	2024		AI security	6
Luthien	2024		AI control	1
ARIA	2024		Provably safe AI	1
CaML	2024		LLM safety	3
Decode Research	2024		Interpretability	2
Meta superintelligence alignment and safety	2025		LLM safety	5
LawZero	2025		Misc technical AI safety research	10
Geodesic	2025		CoT monitoring	4
Sharon Li (University of Wisconsin Madison)	2020		LLM safety	10
Yaodong Yang (Peking University)	2022		LLM safety	10
Dawn Song	2020		Misc technical AI safety research	5
Vincent Conitzer	2022		Multi-agent alignment	8
Stanford Center for AI Safety	2018		Misc technical AI safety research	20
Formation Research	2025		Lock-in risk research	2
Stephen Byrnes	2021		Brain-like AGI safety	1
Roman Yampolskiy	2011		Misc technical AI safety research	1
Softmax	2025		Multi-agent alignment	3
70				645

Non-technical AI safety organizations table

Name	Founded	Category	FTEs
Centre for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)	2019	research	20
Epoch AI	2022	forecasting	20
Centre for Governance of AI (GovAI)	2018	governance	40
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence	2016	research	25
Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)	2012	research	3
OpenAI	2016	governance	10
DeepMind	2010	governance	10
Future of Life Institute	2014	advocacy	10
Center on Long-Term Risk	2013	research	5
Open Philanthropy	2017	research	15
Rethink Priorities	2018	research	5
UK AI Security Institute (AISI)	2023	governance	25
European AI Office	2024	governance	50
Ada Lovelace Institute	2018	governance	15
AI Now Institute	2017	governance	15
The Future Society (TFS)	2014	advocacy	18
Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR)	2019	governance	5
Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI)	2019	research	5
Pause AI	2023	advocacy	20
Simon Institute for Longterm Governance	2021	governance	10
AI Policy Institute	2023	governance	1
The AI Whistleblower Initiative	2024	whistleblower support	5
Machine Intelligence Research Institute	2024	advocacy	5
Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance	2024	governance	5
ControlAI	2023	advocacy	10
International Association for Safe and Ethical AI	2024	research	3
International AI Governance Alliance	2025	advocacy	1
Center for AI Standards and Innovation (U.S. AI Safety Institute)	2023	governance	10
China AI Safety and Development Association	2025	governance	10
Transformative Futures Institute	2022	research	4
AI Futures Project	2024	advocacy	5
AI Lab Watch	2024	watchdog	1
Center for Long-Term Artificial Intelligence	2022	research	12
SaferAI	2023	research	14
AI Objectives Institute	2021	research	16
Concordia AI	2020	research	8
CARMA	2024	research	10
Encode AI	2020	governance	7
Safe AI Forum (SAIF)	2023	governance	8
Forethought Foundation	2018	research	8
AI Impacts	2014	research	3
Cosmos Institute	2024	research	5
AI Standards Labs	2024	governance	2
Center for AI Safety	2022	advocacy	5
CeSIA	2024	advocacy	5
45			489