EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF)

Theory of Change

EAIF funds projects that "build and empower the community of people trying to identify actions that do the greatest good from a scope-sensitive and impartial welfarist view." In practice, this means funding EA community building groups, cause prioritization research, and epistemic infrastructure (tools like forecasting platforms, EA podcasts, and discussion spaces).

The fund's leadership acknowledged in December 2023 that its historical theory of change was "conceptually confused" -- it had been a catch-all for anything EA-adjacent that didn't fit other funds. The pivot to "principles-first EA" (Caleb Parikh, December 2023) was an explicit attempt to sharpen the fund's focus: rather than funding any meta-EA project, the fund would concentrate on nurturing the intellectual community that discovers what to work on, rather than directly funding cause-specific work.

This means explicitly OUT of scope: AI safety community groups, animal welfare organizations, effective giving platforms focused on a single cause. These are redirected to the Long-Term Future Fund, the Animal Welfare Fund, or other funders.

The theory: if EA's distinctive contribution is the principled search for the most impactful interventions, then funding the community's capacity to reason well is the highest-leverage meta-activity. Caleb: "I don't think EA has done much 'noticing what is important to work on' recently."

What They Do

EAIF has disbursed approximately $18.9M across 499 grants since 2020. The trajectory is dramatic:

Year	Grants Funded	Amount	Acceptance Rate
2022	264	$11.27M	51%
2023 (to June)	83	$2.08M	43%
2024	~41	~$1.4-1.9M	N/A
2025 (partial)	34	~$2.4M	N/A

The 85% drop from peak ($11.3M in 2022) to trough (~$1.5M in 2024) tracks the FTX collapse and the OP distancing. The fund went from dispersing ~$1M/month to ~$130K/month.

Typical grants: $5K-$200K (median ~$25K). Recipients include national/regional EA groups (EA Poland, EA Philippines, EA Barcelona, EA Brazil), epistemic infrastructure (Metaculus, Hear This Idea podcast, Effective Thesis), and cause prioritization research (Rethink Priorities survey work).

EAIF is also absorbing CEA's Community Building Grants (CBG) program, which funded ~18 groups at ~50 universities. This makes EAIF the primary global funding mechanism for EA community builders.

The fund's status oscillated rapidly: "not funding constrained" ($3.3M balance, November 2024) to "now more funding constrained" ($2.6M balance, May 2025) within six months. Grantmaking paused entirely June-July 2025 during the CEA merger transition.

Key People

Loic Watine -- Director of EA Funds since January 2026. Previously Chief Research and Policy Officer at Innovations for Poverty Action (15 years). An outsider hire with no prior EA community track record. This is a significant bet on professionalization over insider knowledge.

Caleb Parikh -- Project Lead / Executive Director of EA Funds, who navigated the OP distancing, principles-first pivot, and CEA merger. Previously at Global Priorities Institute and CEA.

Harri Besceli -- Fund manager (early 2024, transitioning out). The most candid insider voice. After working at CEA's Groups Team from 2016-2021, he quit, spent years depressed, returned to EAIF as a fund manager, and described the work as "particularly taxing on the soul -- being a gatekeeper of funds to a community that no longer resonated, assessing people and projects worthiness, no clear feedback loops." CEA decided not to keep him on post-merger.

Notable pattern: fund managers consistently leave EAIF for their primary work. Nick Beckstead (near-inactive sole manager 2017-2018), Max Daniel (left for OP), Buck Shlegeris (left), Michelle Hutchinson (at 80K Hours). EA Funds historically had only 2 full-time employees managing eight-figure annual throughput.

Money and Incentives

Total budget: EAIF-specific financials are not independently available. It operates as a program within EVF USA (EIN 47-1988398, 2023 revenue: $75M covering all EVF projects). EAIF's own grantmaking: ~$1.5-2.5M/year (2024-2025). Operational costs for all of EA Funds: ~$700-800K/year.

Revenue breakdown:

2022: Open Philanthropy provided >80% of EAIF's grantmaking funding
Aug 2023: OP shifted to 2:1 donation matching ($3.5M cap), then ceased grantmaking funding entirely
2025: OP funds only operations ($602K for all EA Funds). Grantmaking is community-funded
SFF (Jaan Tallinn): $699K grant to EAIF (details sparse)
Individual donors: now the primary funding source, but EAIF filled only 43% of its OP match ceiling vs. LTFF's full match -- suggesting a smaller donor base

Business model: 100% of publicly donated money goes to grantees. Operational expenses covered separately, primarily by OP via CEA. Post-merger, CEA's operations team (led by Anna Weldon, ex-OP Director of Internal Operations) supports EAIF.

Key incentive concerns:

CEA merger conflict: The entity running EA Global, the EA Forum, and community programs now controls the fund that evaluates competing programs. Leadership acknowledges: "it's possible that EA Funds grantmakers operating within CEA will be biased towards CEA's interests in a way we cannot entirely eliminate or correct for."
OP influence persistence: Even after formal distancing, OP funds CEA's operations, and CEA's COO is ex-OP. The personnel pipeline creates ongoing influence channels.
AI lab employee giving: If EAIF's community donor base includes significant AI lab employee giving, donors' career interests may subtly influence what EAIF funds.
Grantee dependency: Community builders depend on EAIF for year-to-year funding with no alternative. This creates a power dynamic where grantees optimize for EAIF's unstated preferences rather than local impact.

FTX settlement: EV repaid 100% of FTX-received funds ($26.8M). Investigation found no knowledge of fraud. Wytham Abbey sold at ~$8.6M loss.

What Others Say

Grantee criticism is the most damning evidence. Three national EA groups (Philippines, Poland, Barcelona) experienced abrupt EAIF funding cuts that threatened organizational survival:

EA Philippines (Sept 2023): Given only a 2-month exit grant after years of EAIF support. New co-directors had to crowdfund $28-43K on Manifund.
EA Poland (Nov 2023): "We are genuinely afraid... Lack of funding will force us to seek other jobs, setting the organization on hold."
EA Barcelona (Oct 2025): Told they "no longer met [EAIF's] bar for continued funding" after building a national network. "We didn't receive concrete feedback as to why."

The pattern across all three: no actionable feedback, sudden decisions, grantees left scrambling. One community builder explicitly asked EAIF for guidance on what would make their work stronger: "The answer we got was vague enough that we ended up in exactly the same place we started." An EAIF evaluator told a grantee during a review call that the evaluation methodology "probably isn't the right approach."

Structural critiques: Centralized grantmaking concentrates decisions in very few hands. A deleted 2019 EA Forum post identified this concern; an EAIF grantee noted in 2026: "This was identified six years ago. From my short-lived experience, the structure hasn't fundamentally changed." The EAIF-CEA merger makes this worse, not better.

Self-criticism from leadership: Caleb Parikh acknowledged fund managers "believed they should be weighing OP's views more heavily" than warranted. CEA's public mistakes page documents slow disbursement (2017-2018), poor communication, and presenting EA Funds "in a more favourable light than was justified."

What's Absent

No impact evaluation after $18.9M disbursed. The fund acknowledges "meta-work is particularly challenging to evaluate and benefits are highly diffuse." No external evaluator has assessed EAIF.
No COI policy published. Conflicts of interest are referenced repeatedly but the policy itself is not public.
No grantee feedback mechanism. Multiple grantees describe receiving zero feedback on their work from EAIF.
No EAIF-specific financial transparency. Operating costs, overhead ratios, and cost-per-grant-dollar are unknown.
No public grant decision process documentation. How applications are scored, how many reviewers evaluate each one, and what thresholds apply are not disclosed.
12+ months without a detailed payout report (last was March 2024, covering through early 2024).
No podcasts or long-form interviews with EAIF fund managers. Unlike other EA funders, EAIF's leaders are largely invisible to the public.