John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is one of the largest private grantmaking foundations in the United States, headquartered in Chicago and operating internationally. Founded in October 1970 by the insurance and real-estate businessman John D. MacArthur and his wife Catherine, the Foundation began grantmaking in 1978 with assets of about $1 billion and has, by the Foundation's own account, awarded more than $8.27 billion since then across the United States and roughly 117 countries. Within the AI-good landscape, MacArthur appears as one of the small set of large US foundations whose recent strategy has centred on the democratic governance of AI — funding the research, policy analysis, and field-building organisations whose work shapes how AI systems are evaluated, audited, governed, and made accountable to the publics they affect. The Foundation's current president is John Palfrey.

The Foundation organises its AI work across two interlocking program areas. AI Opportunity is one of MacArthur's "Big Bets" — significant, multi-year, transformative-change commitments — and aims to expand who creates, uses, and benefits from AI. The companion Technology in the Public Interest program is run inside the Foundation's Field Support portfolio; its stated strategy is to "strengthen democratic oversight and innovation in the governance of artificial intelligence" through three grantmaking approaches: building the research base for AI evaluations, audits, and accountability methods; advancing AI laws, policies, and regulations that centre public interest considerations; and supporting expert networks for responsible AI deployment in consequential sectors such as healthcare, education, and finance. Where many AI funders frame the issue around safety alone, MacArthur's framing is squarely about evaluation, audit, and oversight as the mechanisms through which democratic publics keep AI systems accountable.

Grantmaking in the AI-good landscape

Beyond direct grantmaking, MacArthur has helped lead philanthropic coordination on AI public-interest work. In January 2024 MacArthur joined nine other major US-centred foundations — the Packard Foundation, Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, Kapor Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, and the Wallace Global Fund — to announce a coordinated AI public-interest initiative with collective commitments exceeding $200 million toward mitigating AI harms and supporting equitable AI development. The announcement, made by Vice President Kamala Harris during the global AI Safety Summit week, made explicit at the field level a frame that MacArthur's individual grantmaking had already been pursuing: that civil society, affected communities, and democratic institutions need their own resourced infrastructure to participate meaningfully in AI governance.

In late 2025 and early 2026 MacArthur extended that frame into a larger coalition called Humanity AI, a five-year, $500-million philanthropic effort organised around democracy, education, humanities and culture, labor and economy, and security. On 12 February 2026 MacArthur announced an initial $10 million in aligned grantmaking for Humanity AI, with funded organisations including the AI Now Institute (a $2 million grant for its national-security and AI work), the Brookings Institution's AI and Emerging Technologies Initiative ($2 million), Data & Society Research Institute ($500,000 for civic-engagement and public-conversation work on AI), the Human Rights Data Analysis Group ($500,000 for AI infrastructure for civil society), the London School of Economics' global forum on AI and social science ($2 million), New America's "Shangri La Series: A Global Dialogue on Shared AI Challenges" ($1 million), the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network ($1 million), and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth ($1 million for research on AI's impact on the economy and workforce). MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey framed the announcement around the role of philanthropy in resourcing organisations "to help shape AI governance, inform public thinking, and innovate how these digital technologies are built and used."

MacArthur is also publicly named as a sustained institutional funder of the Algorithmic Justice League. AJL's own publicly listed funders, Ford Foundation's profile of Joy Buolamwini's work, and adjacent press coverage place MacArthur alongside Ford, Rockefeller, Sloan, and Mozilla among AJL's core institutional supporters. A MacArthur-side primary disclosure of the AJL grant has not yet been pulled into this entry; the funded_orgs field is therefore left empty pending that primary source, with the relationship recorded here in body prose only.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

MacArthur sits among the small set of large US foundations whose recent strategy puts AI governance — and specifically the evaluation, audit, and accountability mechanisms that make governance enforceable — at the centre of their grantmaking. The orgs that MacArthur funds in this space are not movement chapters or membership-led campaigns; they are the research institutes, policy think tanks, journalistic networks, and standards-setting outfits that supply the legal, empirical, and analytic infrastructure on which much of the broader grassroots AI-good movement leans when it engages with public bodies and platforms. MacArthur's grantmaking is therefore most legible in this corpus through its grantees' research outputs, policy-shaping work, and the philanthropic collaborations it convenes — rather than through campaigns the Foundation itself initiates. Its co-leadership of both the January 2024 Public Interest AI initiative and the Humanity AI coalition makes MacArthur one of the corpus's most consequential resourcing actors on the AI public-interest side.