The Cosmos Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that funds research, fellowships, grants and education at the intersection of philosophy and AI. It was introduced publicly on September 4, 2024 by founder Brendan McCord, and describes its goal as cultivating "philosopher-builders — technologists who unite deep inquiry with technical excellence to build AI systems that serve human flourishing" (Source: blog.cosmos-institute.org; cosmos-institute.org).
Stated position
The founding essay sets the Institute against two positions it names in the AI debate. Existential pessimism "sees AI as an apocalyptic threat, urging us to hit the pause button," which the essay calls "not only impossible in an open society but also unwise." Accelerationism "embraces technological progress with unbridled optimism," but for some proponents "the human good is pushed to the margins — tech becomes an end in itself, with humans merely a stepping stone toward a post-human future." Against both, the Institute proposes "a new approach — one that embraces technological progress while keeping human flourishing as its North Star."
The essay also names a governance risk symmetrical to the capability risk: "the quest to optimize the world for safety ends up creating a governance structure that suffocates innovation, harms freedom, and amplifies bad actors." See AI Existential Risk and Coordinated slowdown proposals compared for the positions it is arguing against.
Three pillars
The programme rests on three stated pillars, each attributed to a named thinker:
- Reason, drawn from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty — broad access to diverse opinions as the foundation for truth-seeking, and AI as potential improvement to humanity's "epistemic infrastructure." The countervailing risk named is AI as "an 'autocomplete for life,' tempting us to accept easy answers instead of actively engaging in the search for truth."
- Decentralization, drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville — a society depending on "the spontaneous associations of free individuals, not top-down control." The stated risk is that "current AI systems and their governance tend toward centralization," and that AI could instead deepen isolation into what Jack Clark, a Cosmos Founding Fellow, calls a "hall-of-mirrors culture."
- Human autonomy, drawn from Aristotle — "the freedom to think and act independently," threatened externally by top-down governance models and internally by cognitive offloading, through which "we risk becoming passengers in our own lives."
Initiatives
Human-Centered AI Lab (HAI Lab), University of Oxford. Announced in September 2024 and described by the Institute as the first initiative dedicated to translating principles of human flourishing into open-source software and AI systems — the "philosophy-to-code pipeline," framed by analogy to a "philosophy-to-law pipeline." It is led by the inaugural McCord Professor of Philosophy and AI, Philipp Koralus.
Cosmos Fellowship. Supports individuals working across AI research and philosophy, hosted at the HAI Lab or partner institutions for terms from one academic term to a year. The pre-launch cohort comprised Carina Peng, Ryan Othniel Kearns, Whitney Deng and Vincent Wang-Maścianica.
Cosmos Ventures. A low-overhead grants programme modelled on the Mercatus Center's Emergent Ventures, founded by Jason Zhao, Zoe Weinberg, Alex Komoroske and Darren Zhu. Tyler Cowen, who founded Emergent Ventures, is a Cosmos Founding Fellow.
Education. Seminars, reading groups, workshops and public debates, including an Oxford seminar on AI and philosophy, and a debate between MIT professor Bernhardt Trout and McCord on whether AI will enhance human freedom and happiness (Source: blog.cosmos-institute.org).
The Cosmos Lecture
The Institute runs an annual lecture at the University of Oxford. Jack Clark, co-founder and policy head of Anthropic, delivered the 2026 Cosmos Lecture on May 20, 2026, titled "Change is inevitable. Autonomy is not.", on how individuals maintain self-directed lives as AI integrates deeper into society. The Institute's announcement of that lecture is also the point at which the existence of the Anthropic Institute became public, described there as headed by Clark (Source: blog.cosmos-institute.org).
Relationships
- related: Jack Clark — Founding Fellow, and the 2026 Cosmos Lecturer
- related: The Anthropic Institute — whose existence was first disclosed in a Cosmos announcement
- related: Anthropic — employer of the 2026 lecturer
- related: AI Existential Risk — the debate the Institute positions itself between
- related: Coordinated slowdown proposals compared — the pause position the founding essay argues against