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Kapor Foundation Partners With VP Kamala Harris and Nine Foundations to Deploy $200M Towards Advancing Equitable AI

We are excited to partner with Vice President Kamala Harris on her new initiative at this critical time to ensure that Artificial Intelligence advances the public interest across key areas, promotes responsible innovation, and mitigates harm. This effort is intended to work in tandem with President Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI, ensuring that resources across government and philanthropy are working to advance equity in AI.

The Kapor Foundation is proud to join nine other philanthropic organizations who are collectively deploying $200 million in grants to advance equitable AI in priority areas as outlined by VP Harris today: 

1. Ensure that AI protects democracy and the rights and freedoms of all people
2. Leverage AI to innovate in the public interest and deliver breakthroughs to improve quality of life for people around the world 
3. Empower workers to thrive amid AI-driven changes across sectors and industries
4. Improve transparency, interpretability, and accountability for AI models, companies, and deployers
5. Support the development of international AI rules and norms

As part of our Equitable Technology Policy Initiative, we support key organizations and leaders that embody these core principles and are advancing racial justice-centered technology policy, advocacy, research, and programs. We’d like to uplift the important work of our partners across the ecosystem including The Distributed AI Research Institute, Center on Race & Digital Justice, Algorithmic Justice League, Color of Change, NAACP, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Tech Equity Collaborative, AI for the People, Consumer Reports Digital Lab, Federation of American Scientists, Disinfo Defense League, Free Press, Disinfo Federation, Equis, Heller Institute’s Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, New Media Ventures, NorCal Grantmakers, Tech Transparency Project, and more.

We look forward to continued collaboration with the participating philanthropies to coordinate support, align on funding, and convene in the new year:

David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Democracy Fund
Ford Foundation
Heising-Simons Foundation
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
Omidyar Network
Open Society Foundations
Wallace Global Fund

The Kapor Foundation calls on aligned members of the funding community concerned with building a more equitable technology ecosystem to join us in this collaboration. For more info: comms@kaporcenter.org