About the Foundation
An independent institution for the age of artificial intelligence.
We were founded on a simple conviction: that a technology this consequential should not be understood — or governed — only by the people who profit from building it.
Our mission
To make artificial intelligence comprehensible, accountable, and beneficial to the public.
The Artificial Intelligence Foundation conducts and publishes independent research, builds free educational resources, and develops practical standards that help institutions adopt AI responsibly. Everything we produce is published openly, because a public-interest mission is only credible if its work can be examined by the public.
Our origins
Founded in 2019, funded for independence.
The Foundation was established in 2019 by Philip Odegard and is supported principally by the Odegard Foundation, a private philanthropic organisation with a non-partisan mandate spanning artificial intelligence, healthcare education, and environmental preservation. Endowment-based funding is deliberate: it frees our research agenda from the influence of the companies and governments whose work we examine.
What we believe
Five principles that shape everything we do.
01 — Independence is non-negotiable
We do not accept funding from the AI industry we study. Our conclusions follow the evidence, not the interests of a sponsor.
02 — Openness by default
Research that cannot be read, checked, and challenged by the public cannot serve the public. We publish in the open.
03 — Clarity over complexity
Important ideas about AI should be explainable to a thoughtful non-expert. If we cannot explain it plainly, we do not understand it well enough yet.
04 — Evidence over prediction
We resist both utopian and apocalyptic forecasting. We describe what is known, flag what is uncertain, and say when no one knows.
05 — Benefit must be shared
The gains from artificial intelligence should reach the many, not concentrate among the few. We work toward equitable outcomes.
A note from the founder
Why this work, and why now
When we established the Foundation in 2019, artificial intelligence was already reshaping the systems people depend on — how they are diagnosed, hired, taught, policed, and informed — yet public understanding lagged years behind the technology. That gap has only widened.
I did not want to build another advocacy group arguing that AI is humanity's salvation, nor another warning that it is our undoing. The honest truth is more demanding than either story: artificial intelligence is a tool of extraordinary range whose consequences depend entirely on the care with which we build, deploy, and govern it. Getting that care right requires institutions that can study the technology without a stake in the outcome.
The Foundation is that kind of institution. It is funded to be patient, structured to be independent, and committed to being useful — to the student trying to understand a headline, the clinician evaluating a diagnostic tool, the official drafting a regulation. If our work helps any of them reason more clearly, it will have earned its keep.
— Philip Odegard, Founder