Who’s funding AI & Society work in Europe? A landscape review

This landscape review undertaken by the European AI & Society Fund aims to understand how to engage more philanthropic organisations in supporting the field. In order to do so, we have surveyed our grantees to understand their needs, undertaken research into the current funding landscape and interviewed a number of foundations that are not yet EAI&SF partners to understand the opportunities and barriers to growing philanthropic engagement around AI. This research builds on the Fund’s previous mapping conducted in 2021.
We then offer conclusions about the opportunities for the European AI & Society Fund to act on these insights.

The current intense debate surrounding the future development of Artificial Intelligence underlines why it’s critical to have a strong and resilient civil society ecosystem that can speak up for the needs of people and society. Since the establishment of the European AI & Society Fund in 2020, we’ve been glad to see the field both widen and deepen with more organisations engaged and with greater capability to fight for the public interest at this time of technological change. This work needs money to sustain it. Philanthropic funding allows organisations to engage in policy and advocacy work with the freedom to pursue their missions independent of corporate interests. The European AI & Society Fund pools contributions from 14 philanthropic foundations to offer funding and capacity building and is currently supporting 30 organisations. We have seen however that the field remains under-resourced given the scale of the challenges it aims to address and there is far greater appetite in civil society to take on this work than we are able to meet.

Download the report here.