Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who may soon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact.
It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings.
There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO. The Manifold market estimates a median IPO date of June 2027:
At a floated $300B valuation and many EAs among their early employees, the amount of additional funding could be in the billions. Efforts I'd most want to support may become less constrained by money than capacity: as I've experienced in running the NAO, scaling programs takes time. This means donations now seem more valuable; ones that help organizations get into a position to productively apply further funding especially so.
One way to get a sense of the impact of donating sooner is to imagine that others will donate $1M to my preferred charity this year, and $10M next year. If I have $200k, I expect giving it all this year, for a total of $1.2M this year and $10M the next, would be more valuable than splitting it evenly, for $1.1M this year and $10.1M the next. The $100k in question would be a 9% increase in funding this year, but only a 1% increase next year.
In retrospect I wish I'd been able to support 80,000 Hours more substantially
before Open Philanthropy Coefficient
Giving began funding them; this time, with more ability to see
what's likely coming, I'd like to avoid that mistake.
Now, Anthropic could fail, the IPO could take a long time with minimal opportunity for employees to take money off the table before then, or the employees could end up primarily interested in funding different things than I want to see funded. Still, it seems to me that EA-influenced funding likely goes a lot farther in the next few months than it will in a few years, and I think I should probably donate more this year.
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Note that Anthropic employees can liquidate significant amounts of equity even without an IPO if Anthropic decides to run a major secondary share sale. OpenAI employees recently sold $6.6 billion in shares.
There's also an important question about which EA causes are differentially more or less likely to be funded. If you think Pause AI is good, Anthropic's IPO probably won't help. If you think mechanistic interpretability is valuable, it might help to fund more training in relevant areas, but you should expect an influx of funding soon. And if you think animal welfare is important, funding new high risk startups that can take advantage of wave of funding in a year may be an especially promising bet.
Good note. Also worth keeping in mind the base rate of companies going under. FTX committing massive fraud was weird; but a young, fast-growing, unprofitable company blowing up was decidedly predictable, and IMO the EA community was banking too hard on FTX money being real.
Plus the planning fallacy, i.e., if someone says they want to do something by some date, then it'll probably happen later than that.
My off-the-cuff guess is
I'm super encouraged that you think a large amount of money will flow in to good causes from Anthropic employees. I really hope you are right, although I think there's likely to be moderate-heavy disappointment on the Anthropic/Giving front.
Maintaining radical generosity and the altruistic values you used to have on the path to riches is really difficult. Most people unfortunately will become far more selfish, and rationalise keeping money they previously intended to give away. Rare cases like Moskowitz have shown its possible, but there are surprisingly few cases of young people (under 40) giving away millions after a cash windfall, let alone tens of millions. I'm not blaming anyone here at all, just stating an observation.
On the other hand I'm encouraged by cases like @richard_ngo that do distribute good amounts of riches that come in. So its difficult but possible!
This seems quite correct! There quite a few open questions in my mind.
1) What is the chance Anthropic EA's either aren't interested in donating or will spread their donations out across significant time? If they are EA, it seems unlikely that they will struggle to understand the "donation timing" case.
2) What percent of the IPO do we expect to be donated? To which cause areas?
3) What is our estimate for how logarithmic the utility functions of common EA charities are?
4) Isn't AI just predicting the next word? Why would Anthropic be able to make any money from this?
The argument is less about how the value of the marginal dollar falls off, but instead about how smoother funding is usually much more valuable to projects. Imagine I'm trying to decide between donating $100k today and $100k in a year, or $200k today. If I expect everyone else together will be donating $1M today and $10M in a year, then I should probably pick the $200k today. The idea is that the charity can probably much more productively use $1.2M today and $10M in a year than $1.1M today and $10.1M in a year.
I think there’s something like a, I don’t know, maybe 95% chance the AI industry is in a bubble. (I explained the evidence and reasoning for this at length here.) I have no idea how an AI bubble popping might affect the likelihood or the timing of an IPO. I strongly believe the bubble will pop eventually, but I have no idea when — everyone agrees you can’t time the market and you can’t time bubbles. I also have no idea when (or even if) Anthropic is planning to do an IPO. There’s so much complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. So, I don’t know how the probability of a bubble would affect your personal donation decisions.
Another thing that’s uncertain is how severe the bubble pop will be. Let’s say we think that Anthropic is valued at $300 billion or $350 billion now. Anthropic could get absolutely decimated on valuation and go down to, say, $100 billion. But the founders’ and early employees’ equity would still be worth billions. [Edit: to clarify, I'm not predicting this, just giving an example of how even a huge drop in valuation would still leave the founders/early employees very rich.]
i don't trust any take which is that confident that any industry is a Bubble. Even the best economists are terrible at predicting bubbles and the market is not completely useless at predicting things either.
The market is a curious thing. The market is efficient, yet if no one disagreed with the market, it wouldn’t be. Human life is suffused with paradox and mystery.
If you are considering global health, helping the GiveWell All Grants Fund filling the most high impact programs affected by large US & European aid cuts the past couple years may be more significant than whether Anthropic employees donate a lot of money soon.
i disagree (weakly) because i think there are few USAID funded programs that were very cost effective. GiveWell disagrees so I'm probably wrong as they have done far more research.
I think this is an important comment, to remind those who do think this is a particularly high impact time to give.
I’m somewhat surprised about the lack of information about Anthropic employee’s donation plans.
Potential reasons:
Interested to hear whether I’ve missed a major consideration and whether people have takes about which of these reasons is most likely/explanatory.
By default, people don't talk publicly about their donation plans, especially 1–2 years in advance. It probably just hasn't occurred to them that they should.
[Not tax/financial advice]
I agree, especially for donors who want to give to 501(c)(3)'s, since a lot of Anthropic equity is pledged to c3's.
Another consideration for high-income donors that points in the same direction: if I'm not mistaken, 2025 is the last tax year where donors in the top tax bracket (AGI > $600k) can deduct up to 60% of their AGI; the One Big Beautiful Bill Act lowers this number to 35%. (Someone should check this, though, because it's possible that I'm misinterpreting the rule.)
IIRC, the 35% figure comes from the value of the deduction for people in the 37% bracket. Basically, you will only see 35% back from the deduction instead of the full 37% (saving $0.35 in taxes vs $0.37 for every dollar donated in that bracket).
I am not aware of any changes to the limit in total qualified donations, but you should still be able to take advantage of carryover rules if you exceed the limit.
I am not an accountant and this is not financial advice - I just don't want people to be discouraged from giving in the coming years and worked pretty closely on the OBBB.
Thanks for the correction!