People-First AI Fund (Board-directed grants for health)

People-First AI Fund (Board-directed grants for health) is sponsored by OpenAI Foundation. A second wave of Board-directed grants will support organizations already advancing transformative AI work in areas like health that reflect the Fund's people-first values and potential for broad public benefit.

OpenAI Foundation’s People-First AI Fund is investing in AI for service providers | Inside Philanthropy Credit: Evolf/Shutterstock In November of 2025, OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company with a commitment to making a positive impact on society and the environment while generating financial return.

The nonprofit that controlled OpenAI, rebranded as the OpenAI Foundation, received a 26% equity stake valued at $130 billion in OpenAI Group PBC. The restructuring generated a litany of questions , not the least of which was what the OpenAI Foundation’s grantmaking would look like. Fortunately, the company had offered some clues in the run-up to the announcement.

In September 2025, it launched the People-First AI Fund to support nonprofits “working at the intersection of innovation and public good. ” Two months later, the foundation announced its first recipients . It would disburse $40.

5 million in unrestricted grants to 208 U.S.-based nonprofits by the end of the year, and a second wave of $9. 5 million in board-directed grants would be announced in the following months.

At a time when some funders are grappling with ways to anticipate AI’s more profound impacts on society, People-First AI Fund grantees, some of which have never used AI or are in the early adoption phase, hope to leverage the technology to optimize service delivery in areas like mental health , education and food security.

Many organizations in the direct services field have struggled to generate sustainable philanthropic support in recent years, as small donor support declines, and some funders pivot to advocacy and organizing to address the root causes of problems. Federal funding cuts and lapsed foundation funding over the past 12 months have exacerbated this challenge.

If the People-First AI Fund can help recipients operate more efficiently, the initiative will emerge as a compelling case study of how a grantmaker can leverage AI to drive meaningful, short-term impact.

“One thing the grantees have in common is that they’re community-driven,” said Daniel Zingale, who convened OpenAI’s nonprofit commission, which supported an engagement process to inform how OpenAI’s philanthropy can address long-term systemic issues. “And what we heard, wherever we went, was that AI should benefit all of humanity, and humanity needs a seat at the table.

” How the People-First AI Fund came together The seeds of the fund were planted in April of last year, when OpenAI assembled a nonprofit commission tasked with informing OpenAI’s philanthropic efforts. The company “communicated a genuine interest in getting community input,” said Zingale, who previously served as senior vice president of the The California Endowment and strategist to California Govs.

Gavin Newsom and Arnold Schwarzenegger. “If you believe that AI carries with it extreme promise and extreme peril, then who are the people that you would want to tip that balance toward benefiting humanity? ” The commission’s advisors held listening sessions with over 100 organizations and over 500 individuals throughout California.

“The commission called the shots in terms of whether we would do a listening tour and who we would invite,” he said. “I think we did a good job at getting cross-representation across the communities — faith-based groups, academia, community organizing, farm workers. ” The commission published its report in July.

Its authors encouraged the company’s philanthropy to zero in on three priorities: invest in the people sector and close economic gaps, democratize the understanding and influence of AI, and unlock AI to transform and scale philanthropy.

In an October 28 post announcing the company’s restructuring, OpenAI Board of Directors Chair Bret Taylor said the OpenAI Foundation “will initially focus on a $25 billion commitment” across two areas: health and curing diseases, and supporting “practical technical solutions for AI resilience, which is about maximizing AI’s benefits and minimizing its risks.

” While Taylor’s post didn’t provide a timeline for disbursing those funds, I noted the potential challenge of scaling up the foundation’s grantmaking machinery. The fact that the foundation selected 208 People-First AI Fund recipients after reviewing close to 3,000 applications within two months suggests its officers were up to the task. The $40.

5 million the foundation will disburse through the fund by the end of 2025 was a 440% increase over the previous year’s grantmaking outlay of $7. 5 million. “We tried to make the process user friendly and not burdensome or bureaucratic,” Zingale said.

“Obviously, it needed to be thorough and done with integrity, but I think it demonstrated that it doesn’t have to put already strained community organizations through an arduous process. ” Contextualizing the People-First AI Fund within the larger funding ecosystem Every funder wants to see AI developed in a way that benefits humanity.

However — and at the risk of oversimplifying a large, interconnected and growing segment of the philanthrosphere — grantmakers’ AI-related work often falls into one of two buckets. The first is more forward looking and conceptual in nature. Grantmakers seek to preserve the dignity of workers and the diminishment of human connection while staving off an AI-induced apocalypse.

Funders tackling these issues include the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation , Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Omidyar Network and the foundations behind the five-year, $500 million Humanity AI initiative .

The second bucket focuses on more tangible, short-term applications of AI to advance specific priority areas like global development ( Gates Foundation ), medical research ( Howard Hughes Medical Institute , Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ), education ( Salesforce ), economic mobility ( NextLadder Ventures and Robin Hood’s AI Poverty Challenge ) and children’s mental health ( Google ).

Obviously, funders can simultaneously work on both priorities by, for example, planning for a world of mass automation in 2075 while providing workers with the skills to land a job today. Regardless of the issue or timeline in question, funders aim to ensure that AI systems are designed and deployed equitably so that the technology benefits the many and not the few.

Generally speaking, the work conducted by the community-focused grantees of OpenAI Foundation’s People-First AI Fund falls into this second category by addressing what it calls “ immediate needs .

” These include AI literacy and public understanding so people “can engage with AI in ways that matter for their lives”; community innovations to improve access to essential services and strengthen civic life; and economic opportunity in the form of “meaningful, fairly distributed work as AI changes the labor landscape.

” The second wave of People-First AI Fund grants will support organizations “already advancing transformative AI work across areas like health. ” Related Inside Philanthropy Resources: Using AI to more effectively deliver direct services People-First AI Fund recipients have annual budgets between $500,000 and $10 million. Their familiarity with AI ranges from “figuring it out, or they’re very anxious to figure it out,” Zingale said.

“That was a discovery for us, to find out that a small organization in a rural corner of Montana is already incorporating AI. ” Zingale’s commentary suggests that organizational leaders realize that the AI genie is out of the bottle. Rather than push back against it, they can embrace it — or, at the very least, thoughtfully explore ways in which the technology can advance their missions .

To this point, many People-First AI Fund grantees provide direct services in fields like veterans support, health, STEM education and food security. It goes without saying that it’s been rough sledding for direct service providers over the past year.

Many organizations lost federal funding, and those that didn’t receive federal support to begin with had to contend with increased demand due to the cuts inflicted on organizations in their geographic region. Looking ahead, analysts fear that proposed cuts in President Donald Trump’s 2026 fiscal budget will add additional strain on direct services providers.

“There’s a hearty representation of direct service organizations” in People-First AI Fund’s cohort, Zingale said. “We didn’t position [the fund] as a kind of emergency relief response, but again, when you listen to community at this moment in time, what you hear is that direct service providers are in desperate need of relief, and so that found its way into this cohort of grantees.

” Given the profound challenges facing direct services organizations, it will be interesting to see how grantees harness AI to deliver services and the extent to which the OpenAI Foundation shares its insights with the broader field. “I think there’s a general understanding that there’s no going back,” Zingale said. “So how to you go forward in a way that meets people’s needs — maybe with less resources, but done more efficiently?

And I think that there’s a great deal of hope that AI is part of the solution. ” Tech Philanthropy Has a Cultural Blind Spot Philanthropy Is Underestimating AI. Here’s How to Catch Up This Billionaire Couple Have More than Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller Combined.

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