Why we’re increasing the AI focus of our job board

By and · Published July 17th, 2026 ·

In light of AI progress this year, we have decided to stop posting senior-level and mid-career global health, animal welfare, and climate change roles on the 80,000 Hours job board. We will continue to post entry-level and junior roles, and we will link to other job boards that focus on these areas.

Why we’re no longer posting mid- and senior-level roles in these areas

AI progress this year (Claude Opus 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Claude Mythos, all of which represented faster capability growth than I expected) has convinced me that the expected impact of work on transformative AI (TAI) has grown dramatically, relative to that of work on global health, animal welfare, or climate change (henceforth: non-TAI), and that we are entering an all-hands-on-deck situation for TAI. For the time being, our mission is best served by focusing on AI and roles related to catastrophic AI-mediated risks (e.g. biosecurity or AIxAnimals). This is because:

  • We have short timelines to transformative AI: We think it’s quite plausible that transformative AI will arrive in the next 5 years. While I used to be less confident in this, the progress since Opus 4.5 has made me think it is quite likely that by 2040 we will have reached transformative AI.
  • Because we have so little time, transformative AI going well “by default” now seems relatively unlikely to me, which means there is a lot of work to be done. AI safety, biosecurity, and macrostrategy remain very neglected.
  • Scenarios where AI capabilities ‘plateau’ now seem very unlikely. In such scenarios, the world would not change dramatically due to AI, and jobs in other areas would become relatively more important. But at this point, it seems like a mistake not to focus on worlds where the trends of the last few years continue.

We aim to provide our users with the most promising roles for working on the world’s biggest problems. But in a world with imminent transformative AI, the most important intervention for human health and animal welfare is making sure that that transformation goes well. Thus, we’ve stopped recommending roles for experienced users on interventions that don’t engage with the coming changes. We believe their talent would, in expectation, go significantly further in roles focused on TAI.

This is not a happy update for me. As I wrote during our strategic change in focus last year, I hate that this is the timeline we’re in. And while we could continue to post these roles because it’s what we’ve always done, because we don’t want to lose part of our audience, or because of an obligation to the EA community, we would rather act on our belief that we are entering an all-hands-on-deck situation.

Why we’re still posting entry- and junior-level roles in non-TAI areas

In addition to roles with high direct impact, we post roles where we believe people can build career capital to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. We believe that in certain early-career non-TAI opportunities, people can have impact on the world and build skills and habits of mind that would be hard to find elsewhere (For example, many global health and animal welfare charities in the EA space put a premium on calibration and expected-value thinking to an uncommon degree; both are very valuable in TAI work.)

We’ll be making this more clear on the job board so people understand our views. In a way, we think about the primary value of these roles differently from the organisations that post them because we hope that people who take those roles will develop skills to later work on TAI. However, we believe this is better than us not posting these roles at all for the organisations.

Why we’re still posting roles in other cause areas

No changes are planned for our curation of roles in biosecurity, nuclear security, building effective altruism, or macrostrategy. We believe that these all have an important part to play as powerful AI enables bad actors, disrupts strategic stability, and creates new philosophical questions to grapple with. Also:

  • Biosecurity continues to seem robustly good even without the complications of AIxBio.
  • Macrostrategy and building effective altruism are important for continuing to probe the central questions of EA, including “Where can we do the most good?” Even though we’re committed to our current answer to that question, we think it must continue to be asked, so that we can update on future evidence and ideas.

Some important arguments and questions that we’ve considered

Non-TAI work remains much more tractable.
This is fair, but we think this factor is not strong enough to overcome the increased urgency and importance of TAI roles.

Fit matters; some people’s most impactful opportunities won’t involve TAI.
A person’s fit for a role type usually doesn’t depend on its cause area. All areas need operations, strategy, communications, etc.

Also, we’ve always had an impact ‘bar’ for roles, which means that some people’s personal best opportunities will be excluded. This is a concrete downside of having a bar, but the upside of having a bar is clarity for our audience about what we think the best options are.

Won’t this shrink your audience, resulting in less attention to the cause areas you’re now prioritising?
This is possible, but we think it’s an acceptable risk if it lets us act on our true beliefs. Additionally, our audience is already strongly AI-focused. Roughly 88% of our job board users since our first pivot last year have clicked either only or mostly TAI-relevant roles, 4% have clicked a balance, and 8% have clicked only or mostly non-TAI roles. We expect the AI-focused audience to grow alongside public interest in AI, and we don’t expect engagement to significantly decline with this change. Even if it did, that would not be a sufficient reason to continue posting roles that don’t seem as promising to us.

Why bother posting non-TAI roles when you’ll have even fewer now?
We continue to think that non-TAI entry- and junior-level roles are above our bar because of the career capital they provide.
Additionally, this change hasn’t led to a dramatic drop in the number of non-TAI roles. While we’ve removed senior- and mid-career roles in these areas, we’ll be slightly expanding our criteria for early-career roles, which will somewhat make up for it.

Will this put you out of sync with the rest of 80,000 Hours?
The job board has been more pluralistic than the rest of 80,000 Hours since last year’s pivot. This change will put us more in line with our other programmes (such as advising), which are strongly TAI-focused.

Other job boards

We think there are reasonable perspectives within which non-TAI roles could be just as impactful as TAI-relevant roles (e.g. Marcus Davis’s arguments for epistemic humility). In other words, we could be wrong. Thus, we are happy to recommend other job boards which focus more on these roles, and now feature links to these job boards more prominently on our own, so that people who come to us looking for non-TAI roles can still find what they’re looking for. These job boards are:

We have been coordinating with these other job boards to ensure they can continue supporting organisations we’ve supported in the past.

Appreciation

I know that this is unwelcome news for some in our audience and for many organisations that we’ve supported for years, and I’m sorry. We are making our best guess about the greatest dangers of the next decade. It is my dear hope that we are wrong.

I made this decision as 80,000 Hours’ job board manager, but my strong appreciation goes out to many of my colleagues for their contributions to and debate on this decision, particularly Huon, Arden, Jess, Bella, Jenna, and Alice. Thanks also go out to Dylan and Thane at Probably Good, Agnes at CEA, and Ana at AAC for their spirit of collaboration. Thanks are also due to Nina Friedrich, Zach Robinson, and Gergő Gáspár for their thoughts.