William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is one of the largest private grantmaking foundations in the United States, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and was established in 1966 by the Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett. The foundation's reported asset base of roughly $13.9 billion as of 2024 places it firmly within the small cluster of large US private foundations that anchor much of the philanthropic capital flowing into public-interest technology and AI-good work. Astrophysicist Amber D. Miller became president in September 2024, succeeding Larry Kramer after his decade-long tenure; the foundation is presently working through that leadership transition while continuing the strategy commitments inherited from the previous presidency.

Hewlett organises its grantmaking across nine programme areas — Education, Effective Philanthropy, Environment, Gender Equity and Governance, Performing Arts, U.S. Democracy, Economy and Society, Racial Justice, and Special Projects. Most of its corpus-relevant work has historically run through its time-limited Cyber Initiative (2014-2023), through Special Projects grantmaking on the security of emerging technologies that succeeded the Cyber Initiative, and through the permanent U.S. Democracy programme, with parallel engagement in cross-foundation pooled vehicles such as the European AI & Society Fund and the Public Interest Technology University Network.

The Cyber Initiative and its successor work

In March 2014 Hewlett launched a deliberately time-limited Cyber Initiative — initially a five-year, $20 million commitment that was supplemented later that year with $45 million directed to three universities, and ultimately operated as a roughly $150 million ten-year initiative concluding in 2023. Its stated goal was to "cultivate a field of institutions with experts capable of addressing society's most pressing cyber challenges", and its three working strategies — building core institutions with deep expertise in cyber policy, creating a talent pipeline combining technical and non-technical skills, and constructing the infrastructure to translate cyber research for policymakers and the public — were chosen precisely because the field of cyber policy in 2014 lacked enough independent expert capacity to inform democratic decision-making. Over the decade the Cyber Initiative made nearly 60 grants to more than 20 different universities, including MIT's Internet Policy Research Initiative.

The Cyber Initiative's later phases became increasingly explicit about artificial intelligence. In March 2022 Hewlett renewed and topped up its grant to Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology — bringing the total to $5 million over five years for CSET's CyberAI Project, which works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity through technical analysis of machine-learning vulnerabilities, primers for policymakers, and open-source investigations. In March 2023 Hewlett announced more than $20 million in further Cyber Initiative grants to Florida A&M University, Spelman College, Florida International University, and Turtle Mountain Community College, with the explicit aim of building cyber-policy programmes at institutions serving diverse student populations so that, in the foundation's framing, "the cybersecurity field that protects computer networks and individual users can draw on the experience and expertise of people from diverse backgrounds."

The Cyber Initiative formally closed at the end of 2023, but the underlying work has continued under Special Projects grantmaking on the security of emerging technologies. On 10 February 2026 Hewlett announced a $10 million tranche of exploratory grants in this area, with $2.5 million each to Stanford's Hoover Institution Tech Futures Lab and Vanderbilt University's Institute of National Security Wicked Problems Lab, and $5 million split across the AI Now Institute, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, Georgetown University, the Global Network Initiative, the Institute for Security and Technology, Observer Research Foundation America, the RAND Corporation, and Sentinel Bio. President Amber D. Miller framed the tranche around the foundation's recognition that "technological advances like those we're seeing with AI hold great promise while also posing novel security challenges", with named focus areas including AI-driven influence operations, critical-infrastructure resilience, and the development of transparent global technology standards.

Public-interest technology and democratic infrastructure

Alongside the cyber-and-emerging-tech work, Hewlett has anchored two further sets of grantmaking that matter for the AI-good landscape. The first is the Public Interest Technology University Network, co-launched in 2019 with the Ford Foundation and New America. The Network seeded a multi-institutional field — twenty-one founding university members, since grown to around sixty — committed to defining the emerging discipline of public-interest technology and to producing a generation of civic-minded technologists and digitally fluent policy professionals. New America manages the day-to-day work of the Network; Hewlett and Ford supply most of its philanthropic capital alongside several other foundations.

The second is the foundation's U.S. Democracy programme, which Hewlett converted from a time-limited Madison Initiative into a permanent programme in April 2020 with an envisioned annual grantmaking budget of approximately $22 million. The conversion placed democratic-institution grantmaking on equal footing with the foundation's long-running conservation, arts, and education programmes. The programme's stated remit explicitly includes work to "combat digital disinformation's negative impact on democracy and elections", and although it is not primarily an AI grantmaker, the convergence of generative-AI and electoral-integrity concerns has made its disinformation-research and election-administration grantees increasingly load-bearing on AI-related democratic-resilience questions.

Grantmaking in the AI-good landscape

Hewlett shows up in the corpus through several entities. The European AI & Society Fund, the principal pooled philanthropic vehicle through which civil-society organising on EU AI policy is resourced at scale, lists Hewlett as one of its eighteen contributing foundation partners alongside the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, Mozilla, Open Society, Stiftung Mercator, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and others. Access Now — the global digital-rights organisation behind the #KeepItOn coalition and RightsCon — names Hewlett on its financial-transparency page among the foundation funders sustaining its work, alongside Ford, Open Society, Mozilla, the Mott Foundation, Oak, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Luminate Group, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust. And CIPESA's March 2025 article on the African Digital Rights Fund — the African pooled-grantmaking vehicle for digital-rights and digital-democracy organising — names Hewlett among that fund's historical institutional supporters as well.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

Hewlett sits alongside the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the Omidyar Network inside the small US-centred cluster of large private foundations whose recent strategies have concentrated capital on the democratic governance, security, and public-interest deployment of digital systems — and increasingly of AI. Where MacArthur's frame emphasises evaluation, audit, and accountability and Ford's frame emphasises civil-society participation, Hewlett's distinctive contribution has been its decade of patient field-building in cyber and emerging-technology policy: a deliberately time-limited push to seed independent expert capacity at universities, professional associations, and policy institutes that could then engage with public bodies on substance. The Cyber Initiative's closure in 2023 left behind that infrastructure, and Hewlett's subsequent Special Projects grants are extending it into AI security and emerging-technology governance. Its co-funding of the European AI & Society Fund and the Public Interest Technology University Network places it inside the same coordinated philanthropic structures through which the corpus's other major foundation funders also work.