We identified impactful, neglected areas and explored questions we think deserve more attention, including the most consequential evidence-quality gaps underlying IHME’s disease burden estimates, the potential to reduce significant health burden by addressing fungal diseases (forthcoming), and the most promising avenues for health impact as AI adoption continues across global health subtopics.

We see health systems strengthening as a neglected problem that needs addressing from multiple angles. In 2026, this included a landscape scan of AI applications in health, exploring how we can improve the evidence base on the global burden of disease, and presenting Community Health Workers (CHWs) as an investment in their own right (publication forthcoming).

We identified the circumstances in which climate interventions would be as or more cost-effective than health interventions, indicated that the harms from Earth system destabilization could justify a new philanthropic cause area within climate change, and explored where and how rapid, transformative AI might shift the climate mitigation landscape and, therefore, climate philanthropy (publication forthcoming).

Our support in building or improving cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) helped implementers make a rigorous case for investment in their programs and plan careful, efficient scaling. For example, our work with Sanku revealed that switching to bioavailable iron in their flour premix would double their cost-effectiveness; Sanku has subsequently been selected as a grantee of the ICONIQ Impact Child Survival Portfolio.

Our Neglected Animals Project Fund lets us respond quickly when brief windows for impact arise. It has enabled us to help establish welfare guidelines in a Global South country; help advocates start and scale work in three neglected, high-production regions; and commission scoping reviews of new approaches, including identifying a time-sensitive intervention which an advocacy organization is now pursuing. Together, these activities have the potential to affect tens of billions of insects annually. Full details of the fund’s impact may be shared with selected stakeholders on request.

We published a database of existing near-term interventions to reduce wild animal suffering, evaluating opportunities including population control, environmental adaptations, disease control, underwater noise abatement, and wildlife crossings. We assessed each intervention for five criteria for impact potential.

From March to September 2026, we mentored three promising researchers through a paid fellowship program in our Animal Welfare Department. They worked on frontier animal welfare questions, including second-order risks of breeding farmed animals for higher welfare, room for more funding in the wild animal welfare movement, and key open questions on insect welfare. Dr. Rey Edison has since been hired by RP as a full-time Researcher, Shloka Janapaty now works as a Researcher at Fairer Fields, and Dr. Tristan Katz continues to work with RP as a contractor on wild animal welfare topics. With recently secured funding, we will expand the program in 2027.

The first version of our Shrimp Corporate Commitment Tracker is helping advocates and funders prioritize targets and understand campaign impact. It will cover seven countries by the end of 2026, and its figures were used by an organization interviewed by Der Spiegel.

The Better Hatch Network (BHN) aims to accelerate the adoption of in-ovo sexing technology to eliminate male chick culling in Asia Pacific. Our financial support and strategic guidance encouraged the founders to both commit to their idea and launch it sooner than they otherwise would have. BHN has since secured fiscal sponsorship from SparkWell and funding from the Strategic Animal Funding Circle, the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and through Senterra Funders’ donor network. The counterfactual value we saw here led us to design a Founders Program, which we plan to pilot in 2027.

Building on the European fish welfare roadmap we helped develop in 2025, we continued to address knowledge bottlenecks. We published research on the efficacy of electrical stunning for finfish, investigated farmed salmon welfare issues, and published a three-part series on how AI is reshaping aquaculture. We presented the latter in a webinar and at the CARE Conference, and our report was featured in Civil Eats.

The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund helps donors allocate their giving across cause areas, such as Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks via research-vetted, high-impact giving funds. To date, $723K has been distributed through the CCF.

We released the Donor Compass, an interactive tool that helps philanthropists model their giving across causes based on their preferences. It outputs a custom allocation informed by Rethink Priorities’ cross-cause prioritization research.

Our research addressed moral weights, time discounting, risk attitudes, aggregation across ethical views, AI-related uncertainty, and empirical uncertainty within each giving opportunity. Key insights were published as methodology briefs and a series of blog posts.

Our 2026 paper shows how our Moral Parliament Tool can support democratic decisions about allocating healthcare resources across three case studies. The approach offers a more generalizable alternative to existing methods for participatory algorithm design.

Our guidance helps effective giving organizations measure the counterfactual impact of the retail donations they move. Coefficient Giving has adopted the recommendations and said it improved their decision-making in their recent RFP. Six more effective giving organizations plan to incorporate the recommendations, and over 145 people attended our webinar on them.

With the Digital Consciousness Model (DCM), we assess the evidence for consciousness in AI systems in a systematic, probabilistic way across 13 leading theories and perspectives. The model provides a shared framework for comparing different AIs and biological organisms, and for tracking how the evidence changes over time as AI develops.

AICI's Arvo Muñoz Morán co-authored a 150-page framework for assessing AI consciousness with leading consciousness and AI researchers, including Anil Seth, Shamil Chandaria, Murray Shanahan, and Shane Legg; the accompanying interactive tool is hosted on the AICI website.

In its August 20, 2026 cover briefing, The Economist reported on our Digital Consciousness Model (DCM) and presented an interactive visualization of its results. AI Insider and the Lives Well Lived podcast also covered our research, and mentions appeared in places like Forbes and the 80,000 Hours podcast.

We co-organized an academic conference on biological naturalism at the University of California, Los Angeles with the UCLA Department of Philosophy. In the lead-up, we published a comprehensive landscape of biological naturalism as a research program.

We measured the stability and consistency of risk attitude benchmarks across a variety of test environments and found that AI models are becoming less risk-averse and behaving more like expected utility maximizers.

We published a research report forecasting how many digital minds could exist by 2050.

With a grant made in September 2026, Coefficient Giving is supporting the expansion of Special Projects at Rethink Priorities, so we can provide even more high-impact projects with fiscal sponsorship and other operations-focused services.

We supported five new projects focusing on AI safety in 2026: Arrow Research, Stabl (formerly Trellis Lab), Sampura Research, Generality Labs, Allelo Project. They are now scaling rapidly, bringing our supported portfolio to 14 Special Projects assisted.

In addition to core fiscal sponsorship support, Special Projects provided support for multiple key programs and events with over 100 participants total. This included operational support for the 2026 summer fellowship program of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), and event planning support for the Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum.

Our team helped the supported projects onboard a total of 62 employees, including 4 successful visa sponsorship applications in the UK and US. We also onboarded more than 40 contractors to help our projects further their mission.