Incoming money, integrity, and collective action problems

ElliotTep

Incoming money, integrity, and collective action problems

ElliotTep

4 min read · Mar 12

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abrahamrowe

3mo*

Err towards applying for funding from an appropriate fund.

FWIW, I think this approach limits downside risk, as you outline, but really caps upside potential for EA. The existing funds are highly correlated with each other in values / perspectives on certain issues (e.g. I think it is quite bad that there isn't an animal welfare-focused fund that is skeptical of the value of marginal dollars spent on farmed animal welfare, which I think is a reasonable position, and all of the AI funds seem to coordinate quite heavily). There just aren't that many funds, they aren't that diverse in viewpoint, and donations primarily going via funds concentrates power in EA in the hands of a few dozen people.

I think that I'd feel more excited about this approach if there were tons and tons of good funds with independent theses, but there aren't. Maybe that means it is time for lots of people to start new funds. But by default, I expect everything going through funds to mean way less grift, yes, but also way less experimentation, less risk taking, and less divergence from consensus views.

FTX Future Fund, for all its issues / impacts on community dynamics, spurred a massive change in what people thought was on the table. The regrantor program in particular seemed like a genuinely massive improvement in democratizing EA, which, in my view, makes EA better and lets people do high risk/reward bets. There are downsides to that, including grift. But the push for funds, especially in animal welfare, seems like a fairly large mistake to me, and I think the end result will be a bunch of money wasted on marginal farmed animal interventions that Coefficient could have otherwise funded, or were obviously not worth funding.

I agree with the problems you outline in not going with the fund approach, but I don't think the solutions being applied, especially on the fund side, are the right ones for doing the most good.

Very pro groups approaching fundraising with honesty and integrity though!

JamesÖz 🔸

3mo*

This seems overly negative on marginal FAW funding opportunities. I struggle to believe that a movement with only $250M/year will struggle to spend more money productively when climate mitigation spends $10B, global development spends $11B, AI safety is probably spending $500M+, etc. Also, funding in the FAW space myself, I think the marginal opportunities are far better than "obviously not worth funding", and I still expect them to affect approx. several animals per dollar (for impact-minded donors like CG, EA AWF, etc). I'm curious what you have in mind though when you conceptualise the marginal FAW funding opportunity and why you're so negative on them generally.

FWIW I am also very pro having more decentralised regrantors like FTX and would like to see some more experiments like that too! But having almost been a recipient of such a grant, my guess is that this also leads to a lot of wasted money.

abrahamrowe

3mo

For sure - I am quite negative on these marginal opportunities in FAW being good. To be clear, if there weren't any funds primarily (or even partially) focused on farmed animal welfare, I'd make a bid for those to exist too rather than just funds for neglected animals / whatever it is I prefer (I'm not sure I even know). I think there shouldn't just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I'm sure I'm wrong about many things. I also agree that there would probably be a lot of wasted money under this model, but just think the higher upside offsets it.

I'd be happy to chat about views on FAW work specifically, but probably won't here in detail (just because they are complicated and messy and hard to get into without talking about specific groups). At a high-level, I think that diet change work is basically intractable (or where it is tractable it just risks increasing chicken farming), and the vast majority of the value from welfare work is coming from the first $20M-$40M spent on it, in a pretty predictable way, such that marginal dollars are hard to spend effectively, and beyond those there isn't anything super scalable it seems like. I think the climate/global heath analogies aren't quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn't be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.

JamesÖz 🔸

3mo*

Seems like some of your concern is that a bunch more money should be spent on neglected species & wild animals but my sense is that EA AWF is explicitly prioritising this work? or do you think that it's still not sufficient given the potential marginal opportunity vs farmed animal work?

I think there shouldn't just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I'm sure I'm wrong about many things.

I generally agree with this but I guess I'm not sure that there is one dominant position on how to help animals in the EAA world? You might say CG directs a large portion of overall movement funds, therefore their position becomes the dominant position, but IMO The Navigation Fund has a relatively distinct view on how to best help animals, which is meaningful as they're the second biggest funder in the movement. But yes, probably CG and EA AWF have relatively similar worldviews to one another.

I think the climate/global heath analogies aren't quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn't be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.

Yes this is true but GiveWell moved over $400M in grants in 2026, which makes me think there is at least $400M of highly cost-effective opportunities in global health & development, not counting the other hundreds of millions of other impact-focused global health focused funding from people like CG, Mulago, etc. FWIW even a very outdated RFMF page on GiveWell's website from 2019 estimated their top charities had $70-600M+ in RFMF, so hard for me to imagine the FAW movement can only spend $20-40M well (of course, we are a relatively newer movement so we do have less scalable things to fund - I agree finding those should be a priority).

Basically, I just disagree that the FAW movement only has around $20-40M of good opportunities and additional funds aren't that well utilised. A priori, that would just be extremely surprising to me, given:

We have some interventions that work relatively well (corporate campaigns) but there are still many important countries where we have <5FTE utilising this strategy
Factory farming is a global problem, so we need people in many different countries to figure out how to address it
We only have around 2,000 - 3,000 people working full-time on farm animal welfare globally. This seems ludicrously small given the scale of the opposition and there is lots of useful movement building that we probably should fund to attract more good people (basically copying what AI safety / EA has been doing wrt movement building).
The FAW movement has historically paid pretty low salaries, so there are some salary increases just to be on par with other NGOs/issues
Welfare technology seems to be a whole area that could use lots of funding in a productive way and we've barely explored it (e.g. starting companies or putting out prizes to develop better stunning technology, on-farm welfare monitoring tech, etc).
We have historically not invested much in political advocacy, and this seems both essential and tractable if done well. Our opponents are spending a bunch of money on this political work and slowing down / overturning promising reforms (e.g. EU animal welfare reforms) so spending additional money here is likely quite useful.

Also, I would be curious how much of AI safety funding you think is well-spent, similar to the $20-40M number you had in mind for FAW?

abrahamrowe

3mo*

I think I feel less convinced than you that scaling most these are going to end up resulting in meaningful positive impact for more animals — the exception is welfare technology, which I'm quite excited about, but my impression is that the good opportunities here are pretty fundable right now.

To be clear, I also don't think loads of money should go into neglected animals either (though on the margin I'm more excited about things here than FAW) — I think there is a lot more potential for helping animals in wild animal and invertebrate welfare, but there aren't ways to absorb tons (e.g. tens of millions of dollars) of funding there either (at least not yet).

I generally in both cases am excited by a smaller, more highly coordinated and strategic movement (or set of movements) than a larger one, but I think more funding right now would be used primarily to try to make a bigger one. I'm guessing this is a lot of the crux between us. But, I also know that I'm a bit on my own island with these views at times, and am genuinely pro-pluralism in the space. So I appreciate you pushing on it so hard!

I think AI safety mostly can't absorb new funding that effectively, except for political things (which maybe are complicated due to various backfire risks), but it also has a better track record so far than FAW which suggests it can use the money it has more effectively. But I'm not a partisan here really — at heart I'm an animal welfare person who mainly feels sad that it might be pretty hard to help more animals than we already are effectively.

Henry Stanley 🔸

3mo

Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like it’s barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.

ElliotTep

3mo

Hi Abraham, I'm curious what you think about the difference between FTX and this situation is that FTX was disbursing hired grantmakers to do the work. My impression is that most Anthropic staff don't have the time or expertise to set this up themselves, even if it was a model like a giving circle, nor do they want to.

It seems like a challenge here to recreate FTX's level of willingness to fund ambitious projects is that for Anthropic donors, either they'd need to want to spend the time setting up foundations individually, or someone with the right expertise would need to set up their own fund and join the fray on more speculative work.

FWIW my vague impression (I have less visibility into other cause areas) is that as funds anticipate an influx of funding coming into the space, funding more ambitious and speculative bets seems to be a part of the conversation (while hopefully reducing the downsides that came with FTX funding).

abrahamrowe

3mo*

Yeah, I agree with all those being challenges here - I think I was mainly responding to what I perceive to be a push (maybe explicitly in this case) to reduce the options presented to new funders to a few funds with fairly similar views, which I think is possibly a strategic mistake, even if the alternative isn't ideal either.

NickLaing

3mo*

You say "I work at an organisation that recommends funds to Anthropic donors as our primary call to action". and "The org where I work, Senterra Funders, is largely pitching the animal advocacy movement via a few large regranting organisations".

It feels icky to me that there are fund lobbyists moving around trying to convince people who might become rich soon where to give their money. Outside of EA, when people get rich I doubt there are a bunch of charity lobbyists breathing down their necks? I feel like the Anthropic employees themselves should be able to choose who they reach out to, rather than being contacted and courted. Unless they've asked for a bunch of fund managers to make their case which would then make sense.

If you are acting as a cause-area lobbyist for animal welfare here I think that makes you part of a higher level collective action problem as well, if there are Biosecurity, GHD and AI safety funds lobbying too? You say there are "hundreds of orgs" that could stress out Anthropic employees but there are also thousands of foundations/funds in the world that would have as much right as you to lobby Anthropic employees, creating almost as bad a collective action problem as individual orgs lobbying.

Within GHD in EA, there are basically two big funds, Coefficient giving and GiveWell. I think both orgs are fantastic, but I wouldn't be comfortable with 100% of a huge tranche of new money given to them because I think that level of centralisation of power is dangerous, especially if say twice as much money came in than they currently have.

Unless there are bunch more funds going to appear I would probably agree with @abrahamrowe that if there are Anthropic individuals who feel comfortable making their own decisions about how to give, they should consider choosing who to give to themselves (or joining a funding circle, which I'm a big fan of) or even setting up their own funds.

Your conflict of interest here feels pretty significant (even if declared). Its hard to read this and not feel like it might be a bid to directly protect your own interests by asking others to not step into your turf here as a lobbyist. Which might actually fit with your job description?

Ben_West🔸

3mo

Your conflict of interest here feels enormous (even if declared) and its hard to read this and not feel like it might be a bid to directly protect your own interests by asking others to not step into your turf here as a lobbyist.

I think you could also read it as him attempting to solve the problem he's describing.

NickLaing

3mo*

That's true, and that could well be the case. However his job is to raise more money for his fund, and discouraging others from lobbying could help him raise more money while increasing the power/influence of the fund he works for. This may well be an unfortunate coincidence, but a higher level lobbyist asking lower level people not to lobby invites at least a bit of scrutiny.

ElliotTep

3mo

Hi Nick, thanks for engaging. I agree that in writing this, there is a level of scrutiny I've opened myself up to. I'll respond to some of the main points:

I agree that everything I've said in this post conveniently aligns with my job. I also have said them not to gatekeep but because I think it is true and has signficant implications for the future of funding in EA.
I endeavour to provide services to Anthropic staff that sit at the intersection of valuable to them AND good for the world. For example, I've spent a fair bit of time advocating for recommended default splits across cause areas based on feedback from a few Anthropic staff. We've also developed resources on some of the main fund options in the animal advocacy space and run an event in SF to ask questions of the fund managers.
The default preference to defer to funds has come from Anthropic staff communicating that for most of them, that's their preference due to lacking the time or expertise. If individuals at Anthropic have wanted to donate to individual organisations, we've been happy to make introductions or specific recommendations.
I agree there is a collective action problem at the level of funds, and how that is navigated is important. I just think that it is a much smaller pool of pitches than at the organisation level. FWIW there have been ongoing efforts among the funders in FAW to coordinate to reduce the collective action problem.

NickLaing

3mo*

Thanks @ElliotTep that's all very reasonable. As a side question I was wondering what you mean by this exactly?

"I've spent a fair bit of time advocating for recommended default splits across cause areas based on feedback from a few Anthropic staff."

ElliotTep

3mo

Apologies, by that I mean a few Anthropic staff said one thing that was missing from the donor advisor space was recommendations of what % of their donations to allocate across cause areas, so this is something I tried to make happen by advocating for a few other organisations and individuals to do this.

Denkenberger🔸

3mo

Outside of EA, when people get rich I doubt there are a bunch of charity lobbyists breathing down their necks?

Yes, there are. This is the high net worth individual strategy that so many charities use (one of my universities even had a mini course on how to do it).

quinn

3mo

Some people think FTX not collapsing would've been on net worse for EA than FTX collapsing, cuz not collapsing would've led to such a grifter problem. You can find people who saw early signs of people just getting into it cuz of the free flow of money.

I'm pretty prepared to be worried about this, if we get another couple foundations out of Anthropic alums it could be FTX all over again (without the gambling, which makes it better. But with the AI race accelerant, which makes it worse).

NickLaing

3mo

love this. Don't understand what you mean by "with the AI race accelerant which makes it worse" means? Do you mean EA could be compromised by taking money made from a potentially dangerous company? or something else?

Mo Putera

3mo

AI race accelerant -> shorter timelines -> riskier for everyone (not just EA) was my read.

Sam Anschell

3mo*

[Commenting in a personal capacity]

I really appreciate this post, and I agree that the community should be mindful of both risks.

I think the instinct to share giving opportunities with Anthropic employees or other value-aligned prospective donors usually comes from a good place. And I would be excited to see more people apply to roles supporting donors who reach out for giving advice at the worldview level.

But to add to Elliot’s point about the value of coordination, here are a few other considerations:

Before (and up to six months after) a company IPOs, there are limited opportunities for employees to convert stock options into equity or transfer equity into a DAF. If prospective donors have limited bandwidth for their giving, certain moments are uniquely valuable for them to engage. And for illiquid donors, there can be long lag times between the intent to give and the disbursement of funds; donations directed by institutional funds can sometimes help smooth this.
My understanding is that many prospective donors are excited to complement the work that institutional funders support. Hearing from these institutions about the promising opportunities they’re not able to fund can be an efficient way to learn about where more funding can be especially valuable. When a time-poor prospective donor receives an unsolicited proposal from one organization, it’s hard to know how this opportunity fits into the broader field.
As potential donations directed by institutional funders crystalize, orgs may have new opportunities to apply for funding from institutional funders. To Abaham’s point, bringing on regrantors or external consultants with fresh perspectives helps build capacity and catch blind spots. I expect that full-time grant investigators would have more context on a proposal than the donors themselves, and could more productively engage in object-level conversations with orgs applying for funding.

NickLaing

3mo*

I think there's no perfect solution here, but funding circles like the global health and animal welfare ones already set up can be a good balance between not handing all donor authority to a fund @abrahamrowe and not falling into the pressure of getting pitched to whenever you go.

Within my non-EA GHD world the "collective action problem" is basically accepted as a norm and then everyone just does their best to fundraise within that. it's mostly collaborative and non-competitive and works better than you might think. But most money within GHD is given through big aid and philanthropy which mitigates the pressure on individuals somewhat. Also high-net-worth-individuals (fundraising jargon) are generally older rich people who aren't so accessible socially as they might be within EA circles. So there's not really a big program being pitched to all the time.

I do think these dynamics should be fairly obvious to the person with money too. They can make a conscious decision whether they want the burdens and joys of giving money themselves, or defer that to a fund. Or something in between like a funding circle.

"Approach interactions with honesty and integrity" isn't straightforward. even two of your suggestions have some inherent conflict. I find "be direct about your asks" and "let the relationship be real" difficult to reconcile at times. I'm a naturally friendly and open person so my relationships are always "real", but agendas always shape the time we spend our time with people and the nature of relationships. If I really am super "direct" about my asks especially early in a relationship as you suggest, it can at times compromise a real relationship.

Ive also had the opposite problems a number of times, where genuinely i just want to get to know someone and have great chats but I suspect they think I'm building a in relationship so I can ask them for money later. Sometimes I'm even not sure myself whether I'm just having a good time or if I have some underlying agenda! It's not easy...

Also everyone is different. some people who want to give money don't really want to be in a relationship with those they give money to and others do. That's fine! navigating these tensions isn't easy but a lot of the time there can be wonderful relationships between donors and grantees.

Like you I have a lot of faith in the integrity of most EAs I've met running GHD orgs at least. A non-EA funder recently asked me to provide an opinion of a fantastic at-least-EA-adjacent org. i contacted that org and ran by them what I planned to tell the funder. They replied with something like "that's fine and even if you said they shouldn't consider us that's all good".

That's rare integrity in a world where fundraising ain't easy.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]

Jasmine Brazilek

3mo*

As said by others here, I agree that the current strategy by Senterra Funders is too risk averse and giving to only these major funds really limits the impact this money could have for smaller less established organizations. It would be great if the community shifted to a more diverse portfolio of funds (including pooled funds and regraters). If the bottleneck is shifting from money to speed then the community should double down on less established granters who have the capacity to move the money on a timescale that matters. I agree that individual orgs shouldn't be reaching out but I worry about the risk of all the funding ending up in a few obvious places that can't spend it fast enough.

ElliotTep

3mo

FWIW the main point I wanted to make in this post is that individuals should not be reaching out to Anthropic staff who don't actively indicate they want to be pitched directly. Part of our strategy is to have a high-trust call to action, but this is mostly based on conversations we've had with Anthropic staff themselves.

I'm not particularly against newer funds coming on to the scene and agree with a lot of the comments in this post about the pros of doing so.

As a small nitpick some of these major funds do give a lot of smaller donations to smaller, less established organizations, so I wouldn't say major funds = money goes to major orgs.

NickLaing

3mo

I would say in general major funds = money goes to major orgs, is there evidence against this? GiveWell for example gives most of its money to very big orgs. Even if the major orgs give some donations to smaller orgs, that's usually a smlall percent of what they do.

ElliotTep

3mo

I had in mind the EA Animal Welfare fund where small orgs is a reasonable part of its giving portfolio (I don't have exact numbers off the top of my head)

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JamesÖz 🔸

3mo*

I think there shouldn't just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I'm sure I'm wrong about many things.

I think the climate/global heath analogies aren't quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn't be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.

We have some interventions that work relatively well (corporate campaigns) but there are still many important countries where we have <5FTE utilising this strategy
Factory farming is a global problem, so we need people in many different countries to figure out how to address it
We only have around 2,000 - 3,000 people working full-time on farm animal welfare globally. This seems ludicrously small given the scale of the opposition and there is lots of useful movement building that we probably should fund to attract more good people (basically copying what AI safety / EA has been doing wrt movement building).
The FAW movement has historically paid pretty low salaries, so there are some salary increases just to be on par with other NGOs/issues
Welfare technology seems to be a whole area that could use lots of funding in a productive way and we've barely explored it (e.g. starting companies or putting out prizes to develop better stunning technology, on-farm welfare monitoring tech, etc).
We have historically not invested much in political advocacy, and this seems both essential and tractable if done well. Our opponents are spending a bunch of money on this political work and slowing down / overturning promising reforms (e.g. EU animal welfare reforms) so spending additional money here is likely quite useful.

Also, I would be curious how much of AI safety funding you think is well-spent, similar to the $20-40M number you had in mind for FAW?

Collective Action Problem 1. Pitching directly

Individual orgs and fundraisers each have rational incentives to pitch Anthropic employees directly. From any single org's perspective, reaching out once seems fine. But when there are hundreds of orgs potentially worthy of donations, if pitching a donor directly gets you an edge, we have a collective action problem. If each org tries to reach individuals donating 8 figures, then every org needs to employ several fundraisers to contact dozens of individuals. This is clearly a horrendously inefficient way for the movement as a whole to fundraise, and leaves everyone worse off than cooperation.

Relatedly, most Anthropic employees aren't active grantmakers, and don't want to be. From my conversations with them, most prefer finding a fund manager they trust, focused on a thesis they agree with, rather than evaluating individual charities. There's already significant complexity in choosing between cause areas and then choosing which funds to trust within each area. Pitching them directly on specific charities adds another decision layer they mostly don't want (and some have found actively stressful).^[1] On top of that, evaluating individual charities’ pitches is both a tough skill and a huge time sink for people working crazy hours at their day job.

Collective Action Problem 2. Dishonesty

There's another problem I worry about: dishonesty. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wasn’t entirely honest with a donor in order to get money. I’ve worked with major donors for a while, and it’s fairly common for people to:

Pitch you on a grant that internally has one goal (e.g., reduce chicken suffering) but is framed in a way that sounds good based on your values (e.g., climate change).

Ask to meet for one reason (e.g., can I get your advice on an upcoming project) when they really want something else (e.g., oh by the way, are you interested in funding our work)

Treat you differently in a social context. James Özden said the following on working at a foundation “when some people I knew before my current role want to socialise, there can be a lingering suspicion that they have ulterior motives, even if this isn’t the case at all. The changes in social dynamics also appear in more subtle ways. People seem to listen to you more attentively, agree with your ideas more and even laugh at your jokes”.

I think this is broadly bad for a few reasons:

Dishonesty erodes donor trust, which hurts everyone. Donors are more wary in future interactions.

A high-trust environment is one that is collaborative, and donors can defer more to subject matter experts. A low trust environment is one that is adversarial, and donors need to spend more energy vetting claims, figuring out who to trust.

This is going to be a multi-stage game, where people donate over multiple years. Dishonesty one year means a donor is more likely to give less or nothing at all the next year.

This is all very abstract, so I’d invite you to think about being a prospective donor, where you are left wondering who at this house party you’re getting along with will pitch you next week. That you’re working 60-80 hour weeks and then feel guilty about all the pitches you have to turn down. Contrast this with the world in which your community, fund advisors, and friends are honest and trying their best to help you donate in a way that is transparent and respectful.

My recommendations for high-integrity fundraising:

For those of you who don’t work at a fund or regrantor, avoid adding to the number of people pitching Anthropic donors. Err towards applying for funding from an appropriate fund.^[2]

Approach interactions with honesty and integrity

Be direct about your asks. If you want to pitch someone, despite Collective Action Problem #1 above, make clear that this is the ask, and make it very easy for them to say no.
Be honest when pitching. Clearly and honestly communicate the goals and limitations rather than what you think the person across from you wants to hear. This is one of the norms that I think makes EA great and exceptional.
Let the relationship be real. Some of the most effective donor cultivation in this space comes from people who genuinely enjoy talking to donors about the movement, with no specific ask, trusting that good relationships produce good outcomes over time. The extractive version, where every interaction is engineered toward a funding outcome, eventually becomes obvious and corrosive.

This is the highest integrity community I know of. Let’s keep it up.

Thanks to Zoë Sigle, James Özden, Robin Larson, and Olivia Larsen, for feedback on an early draft of this post. While this work overlaps with my work at Senterra Funders, all views are my own. Claude was helpful, but I ended up typing everything myself.

^{^}

Noting my conflict of interest here: I work at an organisation that recommends funds to Anthropic donors as our primary call to action. I still think this is the right call.

^{^}

For context, there are many regranting organisations across all the main EA cause areas pitching Anthropic prospective donors such as GiveWell, Coefficient Giving, etc. The org where I work, Senterra Funders, is largely pitching the animal advocacy movement via a few large regranting organisations.