Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to you. The way to blow it is to cold email them. Despite previous attempts to discourage it, this is still happening, and EA needs to do better on this as a community.
Someone in a WhatsApp group recently asked for donation recommendations that they could pass to Anthropic employees. The subsequent exchanges reminded me of the episode in The Last of Us when the infected start pouring out of the ground.
Every person in the chat started sending their own charity/fund/pet project (including me, in fairness) and the questioner was immediately overwhelmed. Disappointingly, many of the suggestions explicitly did not fit the brief from the person asking, and were fairly obvious attempts to crowbar pet projects into scope.
As someone who has thought a lot about the Funding Anthropalypse (hat tip to @Pablo Melchor 🔸 for the name), I want to suggest a better way for projects to access some of the $37bn+ in donations that could be in play next year. In short - become ‘legibly excellent’ to Anthropic staff.
Do not cold email them.
Should I cold email people at Anthropic and OpenAI?
Frontier lab employees have told me they are each fielding up to 20 cold emails a week from charities and wealth managers, touting for business. They believe their email addresses are being scraped and even reverse-engineered. This at least implies that EAs believe it’s an effective fundraising strategy to pitch anyone with an @anthropic email address.
Of course, many people on here are experienced and adept fundraisers, so you can bypass this advice if it doesn't apply to you - but it is also true that many folks in EA have only ever fundraised within the EA bubble, and so do not have expertise in fundraising conventions and norms.
I apologise in advance if this sounds patronising, but people have tried gently making the case against this before, and it doesn't seem to be working.
Accordingly, I want to say clearly: please do not cold pitch people.
It has next to no chance of working, it has harmful side effects and it actively damages your personal chances of receiving funding.
How can I get noticed by frontier AI lab donors?
In the past year, donors working inside frontier AI labs have started routing large global health gifts to me to place. I’m currently advising on a multi-year, eight-figure global health allocation across a set of vetted funds. My advice for engaging these donors?
Make it your mission to be ‘legibly excellent’ to them.
Legibility is how easily a funder can assess someone using the tools the funder already trusts: a clean theory of change, a logic model, a quantified track record, a credential the funder recognizes, a warm intro from someone in the funder's network.
Justin Steele, EA Forum
I think Justin’s point about legibility is right - genuinely good work can be illegible and lose out - which is why you have to work at legibility rather than assume your quality speaks for itself.
Demonstrate excellence through trusted evaluators
In terms of excellence: the most credible way to demonstrate this is to be highly rated by EA-aligned evaluators and grantmakers, already trusted by AI staff: Coefficient Giving, GiveWell, Longview Philanthropy, the EA Animal Welfare Fund etc.
A happy side effect of this is that it will probably make you a better organisation if you find ways to score more highly with these grantmakers.
Have a credible plan for scaling
Second, and less common in this ecosystem, have a credible and thought-through plan for scaling. Absorption capacity is going to be a major challenge of such a huge philanthropic windfall, especially with most donors focusing on the traditional EA cause areas. A great way to differentiate yourself is having a credible plan for growth.
As the fund manager of the Mid-Stage Global Health Fund, I have spent a year funding and assisting organisations to scale, and I think there are some systematically neglected aspects to this in EA.
One is sufficient focus on general managers, with many organisations expecting founders to be the Managing Director and Chief of Staff, alongside fundraising, strategy, implementation etc. This overburdens them and often doesn't reflect their comparative advantage.
Another is neglecting solid back-office functions, such as CFOs, an HR function and decent operations generalists.
There are also enormous pitfalls to scaling without sufficient monitoring capacity (that is, specifically monitoring, as opposed to monitoring and evaluation). As your organisation goes from the founders knowing everyone personally to a 100-person team, you need monitoring systems that tell you accurately what is happening on the frontline. Otherwise, your impact may not be what you hoped.
All of these things are often neglected to preserve organisational leanness, which can improve your cost-effectiveness - but in a world of funding abundance, organisations that adequately cost and staff their expansion plans are more likely to stand out than those that try to grow on a shoestring. (We should also expect the funding bar in all areas to fall, as the supply of money grows, so you probably have more wiggle room on cost-effectiveness anyway.)
Many donors want to support things now that can absorb 2-3x more funding next year. Many organisations have a dream for how to scale, but a serious, costed, red-teamed plan will really make you stand out. Some funds and evaluators specialise in scalability. At least in global health and wellbeing, this includes the DIV Fund, Mulago, the Prevail Fund and my own Mid-Stage Global Health Fund. They may be willing to offer advice.
How much time do I have to build awareness?
Actually more than you think. The two major IPOs in the pipeline are Anthropic and OpenAI. Each has filed its S-1, which is the first step to going public, but neither is expected to float until Q4 2026 at the earliest.
Even after an IPO, there will be delays before philanthropic capital comes online. Each equity holder needs to decide how much (if any) of their holdings to cash out, and the average staffer will have a 180-day lockup before they can sell anything. Accordingly, money is likely to land in donor-advised funds around Q2 2027 at the earliest, which gives plenty of time to build credibility and legibility, and to stress-test a plan for scale.
I would start now, though.
What’s so bad about emailing them anyway?
You might think that people can just ignore emails they don’t like. Or even that receiving incessant pitches is a small price for being a newly minted millionaire.
However, the community needs to stop doing this because it almost never works. If you put yourself in the shoes of a donor, would you fund someone who contacted you unsolicited? How much less likely would you be to fund the twentieth person who emailed you unsolicited?
More than just being annoying, unsolicited outreach suggests you don’t respect boundaries, which is disqualifying for someone deciding whether to trust you with their money.
At scale, this approach also creates negative side effects. Feeling overwhelmed by demands makes every potential donor feel defensive and raises barriers to giving to anything.
It also makes it impossible to assess opportunities on a practical level. As an adviser, I receive multiple pitches each week, and it’s my full-time job to assess them - and yet the most common unread email in my inbox is ‘that project that I haven’t got around to yet’.
This does require some collective discipline - it’s hard to do the slow work of building an amazing organisation and generating awareness of your work. But there is some shared responsibility not to make this an exhausting, unpleasant experience for donors, in ways that could really damage the ecosystem in the medium term.
To put this in explicitly EA terms: the expected value of cold emailing is negative, for you personally and for the ecosystem as a whole. The community is currently seriously failing this test, and it's disappointing.
I’m an AI equity holder and I’m overwhelmed. Who can help me with my philanthropy?
My intention with my Substack and related forum posting is to offer useful advice and perspective on a major philanthropic event. Accordingly, I’m going to highlight organisations doing good work and offer the best advice I can, as far as possible without veering towards my self-interest in these topics.
To that end, there are many mature advisories already recommended by people at Anthropic and OpenAI. These organisations are values-aligned and thorough, with formidable track records: GiveWell, Coefficient Giving, EA Funds, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Pledge, Regeneration Group.
For a second, personalised opinion on your giving, or to promote a plurality of views across the ecosystem, consider a boutique advisory like Bedrock Philanthropy or my own Ultra Philanthropy. I'd argue the ecosystem needs to build these up more, to offer greater pluralism of views and approaches. In short, two Coefficient Givings beat one that's twice as big, so we should try to create as many as possible.
Neither list is exhaustive, and the right fit depends on your cause area, risk tolerance and the services you need. If you'd like free, neutral advice or an introduction to someone who can help, drop me a line.
Subscribe to my Substack to follow the whole series of posts, including why we want many Coefficient Givings, the donor-adviser matching tool I'm building, and what to fund once the traditional behemoths have no room for more funding left.
I’m not sure. The claim that cold outreach signals a lack of respect for boundaries is unnecessary moralising that I don’t put stock in. If your point is simply that it doesn’t work, people can find that out for themselves; I don’t think the externalities are so negative that donors need you to act as their mouthpiece on this. You’ve apologised for sounding patronising towards fundraisers; I’d be more concerned about coming across as patronising to donors, who themselves are not a homogeneous group. Some will be more receptive to thoughtful, targeted outreach than others, especially if the underlying project or work is persuasive.
I’m also uneasy with the alternative being proposed, of becoming ‘legibly excellent’ to the small set of advisers a donor already trusts. That may be good advice for organisations already close to those networks. But as a community norm - one frequently criticised as elitist - I read it as ‘don’t approach new donors directly; instead, prove yourselves to the existing gatekeepers and hope we choose to let you through.’
This post criticises people for opportunistically inserting their own projects into conversations about Anthropic wealth - while repeatedly emphasising the author’s own proximity to these donors, highlighting his own fund, and ending by recommending his own advisory. Ironically, I’m left wondering whether part of the concern about cold outreach is that, when it does work, it allows organisations to bypass the existing intermediaries. Middlemen tend not to be enthusiastic about that.
I thought the section on scaling was useful, though.
Hey Siobhan - thanks for this. These are definitely concerns I take seriously. You are right that my approach doesn't solve the 'access' problem for lots of fundraisers, by implicitly gatekeeping access - that is a real issue, just not one I was trying to address here. I also recognise that "intermediary says using intermediaries is best strategy" is at best convenient.
However, I think you understate some of the things that undermine your position. Things like:
I do take these concerns seriously and I am glad you raised them, but I don't agree with your conclusions. This type of outreach very likely won't work and is therefore net negative, in my view.
Hi Jack, thanks for sharing your experience. Mine is that I’ve had success from reaching out to donors cold before. No donor is going to say, ‘I love cold outreach, please inundate my inbox’; they may nevertheless respond to an attempt if it’s done well. The comment you linked to suggests ways to improve outreach; it doesn’t seem to dismiss cold outreach wholesale.
Whether or not that’s a generous description is semantics; you’re writing off cold outreach as a category. Thoughtful, targeted outreach falls within that category. Or have I misunderstood - would you be okay with cold outreach provided that it’s done in the way I describe?
I appreciate your recognition that this post’s concern for the wider harms is somewhat cheapened by the self-promotion. And I see no problem with this kind of self-congratulatory rhetoric from a marketing perspective. I’d just hate for someone representing impactful work to read this post and think, ‘I’d better not shoot my shot.’ That would be a shame.
I think that Jack is overall making solid argument with the intent of the overall betterment of the EA community and ecosystem. Multiple things can be true:
From everything I’ve seen it seems like a huge amount of money is going to come in the EA space. The last time that happened it didn’t go too well. And from what I’ve read whilst a bunch of people have suggestions on how to approach this, no one has the complete solution. For me personally I feel very excited by the possibility of what we can do with these funds, but simultaneously nervous about it not going well.
We have an absolutely incredible opportunity to do good here. With this opportunity must come a recognition that we should strive towards the highest standards possible. We as a community must try to do what is good for the community as a whole and the causes we are attempting to serve, rather than just what is individually good for ourselves or our organisations.
I believe that the 'existing gatekeepers' of EA, organisations such as CEA and Coefficient Giving – and yes, other funders like Ultra Philanthropy – have done so much to help build this community, and done it so well. Yes, it's in Jack’s incentive for him to say that it’s better for the incoming funds to go through a trusted funding organisation such as his own. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I think he’s likely right.
As a community we want money to be going towards projects that do the most amount of good per dollar spent. There are a number of organisations in the EA community – the 'middlemen' – who's whole purpose is to try and figure this often very difficult question out. I think fundamentally they are going to a lot better at answering this question than an Anthropic employee who has been sent a cold email.
If we want to have confidence that the money donated is going towards the most cost-effective interventions on the highest priority causes, we should initially trust the existing trusted organisations, as well as work to both expand their capacity and create new trusted funders with additional capacity.
Thank you for writing this comment. It made me realize that a main reason I feel uncomfortable talking about effective giving with the wealthiest people I know is that I implicitly worry they might decide to buy a mansion or a yacht, instead of saving thousands of children from death or poverty, depending on how exactly I phrase things. This is not particularly respectful towards them[1] and I'm going to think differently about this going forward, and try to respect their judgment and their character more, and have a lower bar for talking to them about effective giving.
But I want to push back as strongly as I can on this:
I think it's valuable to flag potential conflicts of interest that might bias someone, and to flag self-promotion, but we should have a very high bar for imputing selfish intent.
Besides being against forum norms, I think these speculations about motives empirically have had significant negative consequences (three examples here), make cooperation harder, and discourage people from doing anything that can be perceived as self-serving (which includes many of the most impactful things someone can work on).
It might be a stretched example, but e.g. you mention in another comment that you had success doing cold outreach. I think it would be much more productive to discuss what makes cold outreach net-positive vs net-negative, and discuss your experience, compared to whether you're defending cold outreach out of personal interest.[2]
Although it might be correct, we're all human
Which to be clear I obviously don't think you are
Jack is plausibly knowledgable in this area and interacts with relevant donors, so it seems highly unlikely that “do not cold pitch because donors don’t like it” is bad advice - regardless of what you think other motives might be.