Overview
EA Global is the Centre for Effective Altruism's flagship annual conference, bringing together researchers, founders, policy professionals, and students who have oriented significant parts of their work around questions of cause prioritisation and doing the most good. The London 2026 edition ran across a May weekend at the InterContinental London, The O2, covering frontier EA research, cause prioritisation, career strategy workshops, and a structured 1:1 networking programme through Swapcard.
The 1:1 meeting system remains one of the more underrated parts of EAG: structured 30-minute conversations with people across very different fields, most of which lead somewhere genuinely interesting.
Volunteering
I attended as a logistics volunteer across the weekend, working with the team on registration, room setup, attendee navigation, and general operations. Volunteering is a good way to be genuinely embedded in a conference rather than passing through it. You meet a much wider cross-section of attendees than you would otherwise, and you contribute something concrete to an event you're invested in.
The Content
The sessions I managed to catch spanned a range of cause areas. Climate mitigation discussions were particularly substantive, with nuanced debate on the tractability of different intervention types and how climate sits relative to other global priorities, a question the EA community has engaged with more carefully in recent years. Sessions on disaster risk reduction touched on the structural gaps in how aid reaches the most exposed and vulnerable populations, and where genuine leverage points exist for improving outcomes at scale. AI ethics and alignment content covered both deployment governance and near-term harms, alongside longer-horizon questions about how the field develops.
A recurring thread across cause areas: the gap between what is technically possible and what actually reaches the people who need it. Better tools are necessary, they are not sufficient.