Independence & Integrity Framework
How we work to earn and protect the independence of our research and our judgment.
Windfall’s mission is to help researchers, policymakers, civil society, and the frontier AI companies building this technology navigate the transition together. Doing that effectively means staying directly engaged with everyone at the table, industry included — it’s what lets us have the hard conversations and bring the right people together to get things done. It also means our funding base will often overlap with the industry we study, a reality we address through transparency and structure rather than through restrictions on who can support our work.
We also have not set a fixed cap on the share of funding we accept from any one sector. One year into building Windfall, a hard ceiling isn’t a commitment we can make in good faith — our base of support is still forming, and broadening it is already underway and remains a priority.
Instead, we protect our independence the way established policy research institutions do — through governance, disclosure, firewalls, and review. This framework reflects where we are today, not a finished state: as Windfall grows, we expect to add to it, formalizing practices and introducing new safeguards along the way. The commitments below make up our Independence & Integrity Framework as it stands.
Donor independence and gift acceptance
Funders do not have editorial control over our work, and no funder approves our findings before publication. That is our practice today, and we are formalizing it into a written gift acceptance policy. We work toward a funding model that supports our broad programmatic and general operating needs rather than predetermined outcomes.
Personnel independence
No individual funder has a say in the hiring, supervision, evaluation, or compensation of Windfall staff. Where the Board is involved, as with senior leadership, it acts in its collective governance capacity — not on behalf of any funder's individual interests. Any staff member who takes on a board seat, advisory role, or compensation from a funder or affiliated entity is subject to a disclosure requirement and recusal from directly related projects.
Funding transparency
When funding is restricted to a particular workstream, we disclose that alongside the funder’s name. And because we have chosen to accept funding from AI companies under these safeguards rather than declining it outright, we say so plainly, in our own words, rather than leaving the public to infer.
Research and publication integrity
Every workstream operates against a documented methodology, and major outputs go through an internal review and fact-checking process before release. We may seek technical input from outside experts, including people at funder organizations, but no funder has approval rights over our findings or a say in whether or what we publish.
Confidentiality and convening
Much of Windfall’s value comes from convening frontier AI companies, researchers, and policymakers in settings that depend on trust. Funding does not give donors privileged access to confidential information shared with Windfall or through Windfall-convened discussions. We apply clear, consistent rules to what is shared, with whom, and under what attribution, including confidentiality defaults for convened discussions.