OSI was founded in 2020 by Craig Biddle (Biddle) with funding from the Prometheus Foundation. Prometheus’s links here include OSI’s first proposal and budget to Prometheus and the consequent Grant Agreement.
In 2024, board advisor Fred Fransen conducted a review, including a red-team due-diligence evaluation. This type of review is part of Prometheus’s regular process for reviewing grants, compliance, progress, and expenditure responsibility, which is an IRS requirement.
That review raised serious concerns.
The board concluded that Biddle, despite exaggerated claims of success, was materially underperforming against agreed-upon objectives and had been underperforming from the beginning.
In response, the board required Biddle to formulate quit/continue criteria—measures of merit—by which OSI’s performance could be objectively judged. These standards were not imposed on Biddle. Biddle himself created them, and they were incorporated into OSI’s agreement with Prometheus as criteria for continued funding. (Link to OSI’s 2024 proposal incl. addendum and Prometheus grant agreement.)
By the end of 2025, it was clear that OSI was not meeting most of the objectives. Prometheus’s evaluation of OSI’s 2025 results shows that OSI missed most of its stated goals and failed to meet its quit/continue thresholds.
In several areas, OSI’s apparent achievement in raw audience numbers was accomplished only by diluting the philosophically substantive educational content it had agreed to produce and shifting instead to lower-substance, short-form, and reaction content. This shift further widened the gap between reported performance and the standards required for continued funding.
Additionally, in 2025, OSI raised only $127,000 in outside funding, compared to Prometheus’s $1.4 million, and therefore remained fully dependent on Prometheus.
After this review, the board nevertheless wanted to give Biddle an opportunity to support his position and justify continued funding. Accordingly, the grant was extended pending the production of information supporting Biddle’s claims.
Surprisingly, Biddle refused to provide the requested information needed to support his exaggerated claims.
Prometheus, therefore, has terminated its grant relationship with Biddle, effective February 1, 2026. Prometheus will no longer support Biddle or any of his organizations.
Because certain individuals supported by Prometheus through OSI have been diligent and productive, Prometheus will provide up to 12 months of transitional support to eligible individuals. Any support beyond that period will be considered through Prometheus’s regular grant application process.
Board member, Annie Vinther Sanz, will meet with each individual to complete arrangements for continued funding.
The decision to terminate support for Biddle is not based solely on a few missed numbers. It is based on years of failure to meet standards OSI itself formulated, years of results that fell seriously short of agreed-upon measures of merit, and reporting that often involved fantastical exaggerations of results rather than a candid account of what had actually been achieved.
After years of receiving millions of dollars in support from Prometheus, the board has decided to end its support for OSI.
***
Prometheus Foundation Board of Directors
March 27, 2026
