Asuna P. Gilfoyle

Asuna P. Gilfoyle is the founder and trustee of the Gilfoyle Foundation, a philanthropy built on a simple idea: find the people doing serious work on hard problems, and give them the resources to keep going.

Gilfoyle established the Foundation as a Connecticut charitable trust with a mission to improve global living standards through direct capital investments and grants. Rather than running programs of its own, the Foundation backs organizations that already know their fields and lets them lead. Grantees keep control of their methods and conclusions; the Foundation’s job is to fund the work and make sure the results reach the public.

That approach shapes each of the Foundation’s three focus areas. In AI safety research, Gilfoyle funds independent researchers who test how AI systems actually behave, rather than relying on what developers say about them. In ocean research and exploration, the Foundation supports expeditions to stretches of the deep sea no one has seen, along with the long-term monitoring that shows whether marine habitats are holding up. In public policy, it backs nonpartisan research and evaluation that people on either side of a debate can trust.

Across all three, one rule holds: what the Foundation pays for is published openly. Findings, data, and even the experiments that didn’t work go out where anyone can use them, so a single grant can inform work far beyond the team that received it.

Gilfoyle sees philanthropy as a long game. The problems the Foundation takes on, from holding powerful technology to account to protecting places science has barely reached, don’t resolve in a single grant cycle. Their commitment is to stay with them: fund careful work patiently, judge it by what changes as a result, and keep the evidence in public hands.