Turning the tide on AI: our agenda for 2025
By Director Catherine Miller
2025 begins with a new level of AI hyperbole. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI which created ChatGPT, declared in his New Year’s message that “we are now confident we know how to build AGI [Artificial General Intelligence]”. Having apparently reached this milestone he’s turning his gaze to “superintelligence” that in his words “could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”
If we have learned anything from the two years since ChatGPT’s launch, it should be to treat such prophesies with caution. Like Altman, we at the European AI & Society Fund are here for the “glorious future”. But for us, it looks radically different. We don’t see that future being delivered at the hands of a small group of tech titans who ramp up the rhetoric of AI’s possibilities to win more investment and capture abundance and prosperity only for themselves. Instead we want AI to be a useful tool that’s harnessed with care to deliver the kinds of fair, inclusive and sustainable societies we all want to live in.
In the year ahead our work will be to challenge the stranglehold of this big tech vision and chart a new future where AI serves people and society.
We recognise that the current climate is hostile. This makes our work harder but even more necessary. Elon Musk is backseat driving the US administration while European politics is gridlocked and populist movements around the continent are growing in strength. And it makes our continued commitment to supporting our strong, diverse and resilient civil society community essential, in particular our commitment to supporting the marginalised communities most directly affected by the negative impacts of these political and technological changes.
We will fight the regulation backlash with practical work to deliver accountability in practice. We currently see a huge anti-regulatory push in Brussels in the belief that looser laws will help ‘fix’ Europe’s perceived economic and social woes. So we will work to ensure that existing and newly passed regulation is implemented and enforced effectively and delivers accountability in practice. We’re starting the year by awarding €400,000 to support work on AI Act implementation (grantees to be announced soon!) and have received a record 325 applications to our AI Accountability Grants call to explore how to hold those responsible to account for harms caused by the use of AI in Europe. We will also be building a grantmaking programme that looks at how to leverage the collective power of different accountability efforts globally.
We will support work to chart a responsible approach to AI that truly delivers for the public interest and which accounts for the technology’s climate and human costs. Corporate lobbying promises that indiscriminate adoption of AI will be a magic bullet to get Europe back on its feet. But Trump’s election should be a lesson that the US model of AI is rotten. Europe must invest its imagination in building the alternative – where AI is a tool to serve society, not where society is a plaything of big tech. We’re developing our New Political Thinking and New Narratives programmes to help proactively build this new agenda and sow the seeds of a different paradigm for AI. We look forward to the outcomes of the eight AI and Market Power Fellowships we awarded last year as the first step in charting that new path and will announce our grantmaking strategy in the course of the year.
To make this happen we aim to get another €10m into the field by the end of 2025. There’s increasing awareness in philanthropy of the impacts of AI on social justice. During 2024 our funding partners stepped up to meet the moment and have already committed €5,5m towards our target. That’s already allowed us to scale our support to public interest advocates across Europe. Throughout this year we’ll be working to engage an even wider range of funders to join this movement.
We can succeed thanks to the power of our community. Although 2025 feels daunting – even overwhelming – we know the collective power of the dedicated individuals and organisations we support can bring about change in the face of powerful opposition. In the past year we’ve seen saw how they’ve challenged abusive use of AI systems by employers, welfare services and migration authorities around Europe, won safeguards for fundamental rights in EU regulation and investigated AI systems and set new guardrails for how AI can be used responsibly. We know that in helping to maintain and grow the strength of this community in the year ahead and beyond, we can succeed in turning the tide and build a future that works for everyone, not just the powerful few.
If you’re working in philanthropy and our ambitions align with your mission, let’s connect!