Crosspost.
Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it.
Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic’s founders, and Anthropic employees.
A fairly conservative estimate puts the amount of charitable spending this would open up at around 50 billion dollars per year. This is about 1/2000th the annual GDP of Earth. US charitable giving is about 600 billion dollars per year—so this will increase total US charitable giving by about 8%. Crucially, many of these donors are interested in sponsoring high-impact charitable projects. Ransohoff notes:
$50B/year could fully fund the annual budgets of the following organizations:
- 6 Gates Foundations (~$9B/yr), or
- 67 Coefficient Givings (~$1B/yr), or
- 100 GiveWells (~$500M/yr), or
- 333 Arc Institutes (~$150M/yr), or
- 5000 Institutes for Progress (~$10M/yr)
Obviously, there are many effective organizations beyond those listed here. But the takeaway is that we are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb the money that’s coming.
Given this ridiculous influx of cash, the current priority should be ensuring that it can be converted into impact. This should take a number of forms.
First, we need a lot of new philanthropic organizations, as well as organizations that help facilitate the creation of new philanthropic organizations. Ransohoff suggests an analogue of Y Combinator for philanthropic start-ups. Similarly, existing high-impact startups should start planning for ways to use more money.
Second, we’ll need organizations that are capable of regranting efficiently. AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grant-makers. There’s lots of money and few people giving out grants, in large part because the people who could efficiently give out grants are generally doing other things. Ideally, lots of people doing high-impact things should think seriously about becoming grant makers (apply here to be a Coefficient Giving grantmaker). Luke Muehlhauser notes:
As a new AI grantmaker at CG,[3] you’d likely move >$30 million, and plausibly >$100 million, in your first year, funding dozens or hundreds of people to work full-time on projects we think will address catastrophic risks from AI. Because grant investigation capacity is tight, hiring one fewer grantmaker usually means those millions will just sit in an account for another year rather than being deployed to useful ends. And when a strong candidate turns down a CG offer, the result is often not “a slightly-less-good grantmaker,” it’s just one fewer grantmaker.
Put more simply: a huge amount of money will soon be spent charitably. To spend this money well, we’ll need large numbers of organizations that can use the money effectively and groups that can help get the money to the groups that would use it effectively. It’s especially important, as Ransohoff stresses, that we make it easy for individual funders to give their money in high-impact ways, without having to start a family foundation.
Good charitable organizations can help spare several animals from a cage per dollar. If you start an organization that can productively use funds on this, even if we outrageously conservatively assume that they’d otherwise be spent half as well, and you spend $200,000 per year, that would be the equivalent of sparing animals from hundreds of thousands of extra years in a cage every single year. Remember, the people who started the Shrimp Welfare Project are counterfactually responsible for sparing more shrimp from a painful death than there are people on Earth!
At this point, if you are interested in making a big difference with your career, I would suggest against earning to give, in favor of working for a philanthropic start-up. Founding one is even better—if you’re already doing high-impact things, you should think seriously about trying to found a new high-impact organization that could productively use funds. There are self-interested reasons to do this: with the new wave of funding, these are likely to be high-paying and exciting jobs. Jobs that are difficult, ambitious, and altruistic consistently are the ones that people enjoy most.
A while ago, I suggested that it might make sense to save your money and donate it later. I no longer think that. Given that much of the impactful spending opportunities will soon be saturated, now is a good time to spend on impactful projects.
There are also very strong moral reasons to do it—doing so can have ridiculously large impact. The last time new technology opened up this kind of money, it led to one of the largest declines in extreme poverty and child mortality in human history. The decisions we make nearterm will determine whether the current wave of funding has similar impact.
Here are some valuable projects that I think people should start:
- Navigating the intelligence explosion: My colleagues at Forethought have written up a bunch of specific projects for successfully navigating the intelligence explosion. These strike me as hugely impactful and massively underprovided. Think seriously about starting one.
- High-quality grant programs: ideally we should have more people start organizations that give out grants. We should have many equivalents of the EA Long-term future fund, Longview, etc.
- Lobbying organizations: these would push politicians on important topics like animal welfare, sanely regulating AI, and providing robust foreign aid.
- Building virtuous AI: current AI models are mostly being trained to be helpful assistants. But in a world of advanced AI, we’ll want AIs that are virtuous agents, not just assistants—building early prototypes of this seems valuable. This would be a good test case before handing off power to AI, to see how AI decision-making works on a small scale.
- Charity incubation programs: already there are some groups that help incubate high impact charity start-ups including the School For Moral Ambition and Ambitious Impact. Ideally we should have many more of these and the existing ones should grow. Some of the most impactful people I know have left specific impactful projects and are now trying to incubate other impactful projects nearterm.
- Growing EA: the EA community has been hugely impactful, but with the influx of funding, we’re likely to be primarily bottlenecked by talent, not money. Growing the movement, so that more ambitious and talented people join, is likely to be valuable.
- Animal welfare organizations: imagine having a hundred different organizations as effective as the top animal charities. The Shrimp Welfare Project has managed to help about 5.7 billion shrimp each year—imagine having a dozen or a hundred Shrimp Welfare Projects. This is the kind of ambition needed to take on factory farming, before it spreads to the stars and all is lost. Forms this should take include: pushing for animal welfare-improving ballot initiatives, welfare reforms for neglected animals like frogs and crabs, developing lab-grown meat, lobbying organizations on behalf of animals, and whatever else people can think of to help animals. Ideally we’d also fund impactful projects that can meaningfully investigate and improve the lives of wild animals.
Now is an incredibly good time to start working on a high-impact project. If you’re already working on a high-impact project, now is a great time to plan to expand. If people want to get in touch about working on such a project, send me an email at [email protected] or a dm on substack. Tens of billions of dollars will be spent annually on efforts to make the world better—let’s make sure they’re not wasted.
I've written before that I am skeptical that the amount of funding being hypothesized is going to materialize in the quantities people seem to be suggesting/speculating. If I were to summarize that argument, Anthropic founders haven't said a word about philanthropy in >3 years or something AFAIK, and yet we are just assuming they are going to donate 80% of their wealth. Furthermore, the base rates on people saying they are going to donate large sums and then following through is very low.
More importantly, though, it is just very hard to start an organization that can handle large amounts of money effectively until you have money to start with. How are you supposed to get to work until you have money to start with? I don't think this is a chicken-and-egg problem so much as a more blanket "first the money is in the account, then you start".
As an example, right now, there is an urgent need to get funds to stop the Save Our Bacon Act that could preempt any future farmed animal welfare legislation in the leader of the free world, the United States (as in, we cannot do any of our current best and most cost effective ideas if this passes) and we are struggling to get enough money (we are at $10M right now and we are being outspent).
I was going to write a response but you wrote most of what I was thinking! In general the best way to start an org is small, and as you learn and develop you grow into being able to use more money cost effectively.
I think @Bentham's Bulldog has good examples of orgs that need to be started, but lobbying organizations and new animal welfare can't usually use millions cost effectively in the first couple of years.
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸 At least one Anthropic founder has actually committed recently to their pledge, on Opraha month ago what's more!
"DANIELA AMODEI: And for us, the public benefit is the social good, social mission part of Anthropic. And the 80% pledge that Dario and I and our other 5 co-founders have all taken is really in spirit and in keeping with that mission. It’s this idea that we’re really doing this because we want AI to go well for everybody. And we hope that if a company is successful, we’ll be able to also do a lot of good in the world philanthropically."
https://singjupost.com/oprah-podcast-w-co-founders-of-claude-ai-transcript/
I still think this is weak. This is just typical PR. If they said "we have already put our stock in a DAF. we are committed to getting this money to solve XYZ problems", I would still be skeptical. The base rate is just so low for giving away money and most billionaires actually do talk about their intentions with the money much more than these people. https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-benevolent-artificial-intelligence/
I agree it is weak (but it's something) and I completely agree with your points, I was just adding a data point which seems to refute this quote.
"Anthropic founders haven't said a word about philanthropy in >3 years or something AFAIK"
To be clear, the average billionaire talks about the great things they will do with their money constantly. I put relatively low weight on this. I would love to see Anthropic founders do/say something like "each of the 7 founders are selling a combined $1B of their stock and we are keeping none of it. It is all going to these organizations. AI is going to change the world rapidly and we expect a lot more money to flow to the philanthropic sector and we want to get this money out the door since they need time. It is a very small percentage of our stakes and our board has signed off."
Are you taking bets on whether the Anthropic founders will donate more than 1B before 2030? I think there is a lot of information that should update our "average billionaire" prior (e.g. https://blog.givewell.org/2010/06/03/my-donation-for-2009-guest-post-from-dario-amodei/)
Lorenzo, thanks for sharing that blog post. I didn't know about that, though I know about many Anthropic founders' previous affiliations with EA.
This is a slight update, but not enough to change my mind in the opposite direction. I already knew that Anthropic founders had a previous relationship to EA, and I don't doubt that they have donated, maybe something on the order of 10% of their income to global health before Anthropic. I know Daniela is married to Holden. I know many Anthropic founders and staff are early signatories to the GWWC pledge. I know there was a group house, and I know that early on, Anthropic founders' reasons for leaving OpenAI were around AI safety.
That said, my overall point still stands. They have greatly distanced themselves from EA and haven't said anything public about it in years, apart from pretending they didn't know what it was and other strange statements. Most of all, the base rate of sticking to a pledge like this is very low.
$1B is a very low number over 4-5 years, given their wealth and how much it could grow. I'd also be interested in any donations they have made privately in the last few years (remember, they still earn decent salaries and, above all, could liquidate some stock).
I would bet that Dario Amodei makes <$1B in donations before June 2027, self-reported (money has to move, not just say some shiboleth about donating the money in the future) at 50/50 odds. Any 501(c)(3) would count.
Edit: Sorry, one more thing. I know many Anthropic employees and know about the donation match. I think many employees at Anthropic who intend to, and I believe will, donate significant amounts to charity over the next few years. Some have already started. I salute them, believe their intentions, and admire them. I merely think we have to go "bottom up" in counting these donations as opposed to "top-down," where we assess a person and their intentions and what they will give to.
Thanks!
Not sure how much it matters, but the blog post mentions $10,000 to GiveWell alone, which was likely significantly more than 10% of a graduate student's income.
Yeah I agree, for what it's worth I would expect (with low confidence) they'll donate significantly more. But in general, for most planning, it doesn't matter how much they give in relative terms but in absolute terms.
A larger update for me was looking at GiveWell's public board meeting records, in particular Daniela Amodei is the person evaluating GiveWell's CEO, and seems an active board member here
Something interesting/unique about Anthropic's situation is that all 7 cofounders are now likely worth >$10B, so even if Dario doesn't donate much there's still a good chance others do (but obviously they're correlated.)
Personally, I'm most uncertain about whether they'll end up donating significantly to improve the welfare of biological beings vs focusing on digital beings. I expect them to take machine welfare quite seriously and increasingly so, and that to be something that markets and other funders won't care as much about.
I think it's also possible that they end up donating after 2027, timing donations around a potential critical transition period, and of course they have strong incentives to focus most of their capital to on winning the race.
Yep I 100 percent agree.
I've spoke to half a dozen or so founders within global wellbeing- all are scrambling for non-donor ways of making money or accepting that if their next grant proposal fails they have to shut down / fire most their staff. Nobody mentioned having seen an influx of interest from Anthropic staff, or anyone else, preparing their plans for who to donate to. If anything, there's fewer donors and less money.
I'd been keen to hear from people in other cause areas on whether they've observed any evidence of increased funding ahead.
Yeah, the funding situation in nuclear security is still dire. Depending on how you count, the cuts in US government funding various things that charities may want to make up for were greater than $50 billion per year.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Do you have specific future projects in mind which would be prevented by the SOB act?
Great counterargument. Your skepticism regarding the actual funds is understandable. It does seem unlikely for the wealthy to suddenly drop billions into philanthropic work unless deeper reasons have compelled them. (I'm sure they have their own reasons for doing so, whether if it's related to self-interest, pure altruism, or another variable.)
Secondly, it is indeed hard to start an organization, but not impossible. Things remain feasible.
The problem isn't in starting a large group, but in a person's own drive. What actual problems affect the masses at scale, and which of those problems are you truly passionate about?
I believe that no matter the obstacle, if your intrinsic motivation about the cause runs deep, then you'll eventually find a way to make things work.
In that lens, the funds just become fuel to your already burning desire to solve a huge crisis, one that many are not actively taking the initiative to mitigate.
Those handing out the funds can sense that: whether a person truly cares about a cause and intends to see things through to the end, or whether they just want to do a side-project to pass time. Due to the filtering process, many do not get their hands on these funds (and for good reasons too), which perpetuates the bias that funds are unavailable.
Those in management are careful and quick with their decision, so half-prepared ideas get dismissed relatively fast for the few yet prominent causes (which is where most of the funds go).
Marcus names the sequencing problem accurately. "First the money, then you start" describes how most capacity-building works.
Historical patterns suggest one partial exception. Routing infrastructure — the layer that reduces transaction cost and vets novel cause areas before capital arrives — tends to develop most durably under resource constraint. The organizations that successfully absorbed the Rockefeller and Carnegie waves didn't build after the money landed. They built the intake logic first, under pressure, without knowing the scale of what was coming.
The chicken-and-egg may dissolve if the question shifts from "how do we build organizations?" to "what does the intake layer look like before the flood?" Those seem like different problems with different sequencing requirements.
I didn't understand what this meant. Can you try to rephrase your point a bit simpler?
Fair — that paragraph packed too much in.
Here's the concrete version. In the 1890s, John D. Rockefeller had more money than he could give away carefully. Hundreds of letters arrived daily asking for funds. One ship from Europe carried five thousand requests alone. Most were dubious. He couldn't tell which causes were real, which organizations could actually use a large gift, which problems sat at a root level versus a symptom level. So he hired a minister named Frederick Gates to build a sorting system — read everything, investigate the credible requests, reject the rest. Carnegie ran the same play at roughly the same time, building evaluation infrastructure while the capital was still accumulating.
Gates started that work in the early 1890s. The Rockefeller Foundation didn't open until 1913. Twenty years of evaluation work happened while the wealth was still accumulating — not after anyone had a plan for deploying it. By the time the full capital arrived, the routing logic already existed.
Does that clarify the sequencing point — or does the whole premise still not track for you?
Can you stop with the LLM outputs?