There's been recent discussion about concentration within AI safety. It's disheartening that many people in AI safety have spent years trying to get a more diverse group to pay attention to AI risks, only to be dismissed as lunatics by swaths of people then and now. As someone involved in the AI ethics community in 2018-2020, I remember efforts to get AGI risk advocates to collaborate with a wide range of scholars in AI ethics being met with distain and accusations of not caring about short-term harms (sometimes even with false accusations of racism and misogyny). The level of patience AI safety advocates had during that era could have filled up a colosseum. Others told them they were worrying about something akin to "worrying about overpopulation on Mars." Nevertheless, they spent years with their heads down, running experiments, gathering evidence, and building expertise on the topic. Many of my AI safety researcher friends never took a job at a frontier AI lab because they didn't want to contribute to killing everyone they love (e.g. I know folks who turned down early roles at Anthropic, and others deliberately did not seek a role at OpenAI pre-ChatGPT). As a result, they purposely turned away hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and high-status roles. And now people are mad that many of them accepted literal crumbs (in comparison) from the few funders and organizations who would listen? *We* have been the ones pleading for a diversity of funders and organizations for *years* [1, 2, 3, 4]. And now this is ignored, and the concentration is described as some nefarious plan? Many spent years upskilling in this weird, unstable field until gaining legitimate competence to found an organization tackling problems few people acknowledged until recently. This is not unearned. Critics have been engaging in malicious spins of history, from those who know better, to convince a low-context population of half-truths and falsehoods. In most cases, they do this by leveraging the unusually extensive and public funding transparency people in AI safety have provided in good faith [5] (neatly organized for good open data practices!), while critics are often not completely open about their own funding. Perhaps it's those people who are the problem? Perhaps they're constantly looking for any excuse to disparage AI safety advocates and push for their own larger goals of making money and accelerating AI as fast as possible? In fact, you can see this with loads of VCs. This missed the boat on AI and is now desperately clinging to the world that has already sailed. It's clear from their complaints that this is their first time engaging with AI risk; they don't understand decades of arguments and purposely ignore/dismiss pleas from actual experts ( while somehow being more confident that no such AI risks exist. It is childish behaviour, and I hope we can all treat this challenge with the seriousness it deserves. For our sakes, and for our children's sake. This is not the time for culture wars or clinging to the world that was. Help from ChatGPT for references: [1] (2025) Coefficient explicitly says promising organizations need “a more diverse funder base,” that there are “outsized benefits” from a diverse array of funders, that grantees try to limit dependence on Good Ventures, and that it has offered matching grants specifically to encourage diversification. [2] (2023) Explicitly argues that it is unhealthy for Open Philanthropy to fund the vast majority of AI-safety research and calls for “counterbalancing sources of funding.” [3] There should be more AI safety orgs — Marius Hobbhahn's 2023 argument explicitly calling for many more independent AI-safety organizations, with a “call to action for funders, founders, and researchers” to create them. [4] Funding Diversification for Mid-Large EA Organizations is Nearly Impossible in the Short-Medium Term — by 2024, the author could plausibly describe there being a “near consensus that EA needs funding diversification,” and documents multiple organizations and Open Phil/Good Ventures themselves wanting diversification. [5]