[6] Its headquarters building, prominently located on the Embassy Row section of Massachusetts Avenue, was completed in 1989 on a design by architecture firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls.

The chairperson of Carnegie's board of trustees is businesswoman Catherine James Paglia,[7] and the organization's president is former California Supreme Court justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who replaced CIA Director William J. Burns in 2021.

[9] On his seventy-fifth birthday, November 25, 1910, Andrew Carnegie announced the establishment of the Endowment with a gift of $10 million worth of first mortgage bonds, paying a 5% rate of interest.

[11] Carnegie chose longtime adviser Elihu Root, senator from New York and former Secretary of War and of State, to be the Endowment's first president.

The Peace Palace had been built by the Carnegie Foundation (Netherlands) in 1913 to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration and a library of international law.

[15] In December of the same year, the endowment's Board approved a proposal by President Butler to offer aid in modernizing the Vatican Library.

[19] In November 1944, the Carnegie Endowment published Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress.

[20] In April 1945, James T. Shotwell, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Division of Economics and History, served as chairman of the semiofficial consultants to the US delegation at the San Francisco conference to draw up the United Nations Charter.

[21] As chairman, Shotwell pushed for an amendment to establish a permanent United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which exists to this day.

[22] In 1946, Alger Hiss succeeded Butler as president of the Endowment but resigned in 1949 after being denounced as a spy for the Soviet Union by Whittaker Chambers.

In 1947, the Carnegie Endowment's headquarters were moved closer to the United Nations in New York City, while the Washington office at Peter Parker House (700 Jackson Pl., NW) became a subsidiary branch.

[28] After Burns' nomination[29] and confirmation as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency,[30] then-California Supreme Court Justice and Stanford professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar became President of the Carnegie Endowment on November 1, 2021.

[33][34] In April 2023 Russia's Ministry of Justice added the Centre to the so-called list of "foreign agent",[35] and in July 2024 it designated the organization as "undesirable".

[38] In 1993, the Endowment launched the Carnegie Moscow Center, with the belief that "in today's world a think tank whose mission is to contribute to global security, stability, and prosperity requires a permanent presence and a multinational outlook at the core of its operations.

"[39] The center's stated goals were to embody and promote the concepts of disinterested social science research and the dissemination of its results in post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia; to provide a free and open forum for the discussion and debate of critical national, regional and global issues; and to further cooperation and strengthen relations between Russia and the United States by explaining the interests, objectives and policies of each.

The center was headed by Dmitri Trenin until the Russian government ordered its closure in April 2022, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

The center aims to better inform the process of political change in the Arab Middle East and deepen understanding of the complex economic and security issues that affect it.

The center's focuses include China's foreign relations; international economics and trade; climate change and energy; nonproliferation and arms control; and other global and regional security issues such as North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.