Chile's Kairos lands $50M to train AI-safety talent
What's the deal? Kairos, a US-registered nonprofit co-led from Santiago by 25-year-old engineer Agustín Covarrubias, has secured a $50 million commitment from philanthropic funder Coefficient Giving. The two-year grant—announced in September 2026—will fund the recruitment, training, and placement of people in artificial-intelligence safety roles.
What does Kairos do? It builds what it calls "talent infrastructure" for the AI-safety field, rather than researching or developing models itself. The group finds promising candidates, trains them, and connects them with organizations working to prevent harm from advanced AI systems.
Why now? Covarrubias says that when Kairos launched in August 2024, fewer than 1,000 people worldwide worked on AI safety. The organization frames that shortage of trained researchers, policy specialists, and organizers as a central constraint on managing the risks of advanced AI.
What's the endgame? The money backs programs including SPAR, a research-training fellowship that has grown from 50 participants to more than 800, and Pathfinder, which funds university safety groups. A new incubator, Kairos LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, is due to start in early 2027. Kairos says about 80 of its alumni now work full-time in the field.
Who is behind it? Covarrubias studied engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and has finished his coursework, though he has yet to receive his degree. He co-founded Effective Altruism UC Chile and the AI Safety Initiative UC Chile before spinning Kairos out of the Centre for Effective Altruism in mid-2024.
The signal: The grant is among Coefficient Giving's largest commitments to AI-safety field-building, part of a wider philanthropic push to expand capacity in the sector. It reflects a bet that the bottleneck in managing advanced-AI risks is people, not money—though the reported outcomes remain largely Kairos's own measures.
Read more: latercera.com
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