Imagine you could live in one of two worlds in 2027.

In the first, Coefficient Giving is twice as big.

In the second, there are two Coefficient Givings of the same size.

Which seems better to you?

Having considered it for a while, I would choose the second world. Put plainly, two Coefficient Givings beat one twice as big. I think the potential $37bn+ AI windfall is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve this, with significant long-term benefits.

Is effective giving too concentrated?

In my view, yes.

Coefficient Giving (and to a great extent GiveWell) have enormous influence and power within the ecosystem, by virtue of their size and track records. Coefficient Giving is also the predominant or only funder in some of its domains, such as funding the effective giving ecosystem and farm animal welfare.

The situation seems analogous to a monopsony in economics:

monopsony, in economic theory, is a market situation in which there is only one buyer... Although cases of pure monopsony are rare, monopsonistic elements are found wherever there are many sellers and few purchasers. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

You could argue that there is in fact a diversity of funding in some cost-effective cause areas. For example, in AI safety, there is Longview Philanthropy, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, Astralis, the AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund etc.

In global health, there is the Gates Foundation (granting roughly 20x more than GiveWell and 8.5x more than Coefficient Giving each year); the remaining bilateral and multilateral funders; and a large number of smaller foundations (Mulago, CRI, WAM Foundation, DRK etc.). You could therefore also claim that the global health landscape is sufficiently diverse.

However, Coefficient Giving outsources a substantial amount of its global health grantmaking to GiveWell - around $1bn to date, and $175m for 2026 so far. It’s therefore not really accurate to describe GiveWell as a counterweight to cG - it could even be considered an extension of it.

More to the point, I think the true test of over-concentration is not just the number of grantmakers in a field - it’s also their size and, more importantly, the amount grantees rely on them. In AI safety, for example, Coefficient Giving gives substantially more, and in almost all cases at least an order of magnitude more, than any other actor. In combating factory farming, it is widely estimated to be the largest funder globally, and in supporting the effective giving ecosystem it is essentially the only funder of note.

Across all cause areas, it is often true that there is no other funder who could step in and become a grantee’s majority funder if the main one walked away.

This, to me, is the true test of over-concentration, and it seems true of both Coefficient Giving and GiveWell, for a large number of their grantees. It is also not just theoretical - it is something that Coefficient Giving’s grantees themselves are concerned about.

In short, Coefficient Giving and GiveWell are exceptionally important to the majority of their grantees, in ways that cause significant risks to the grantees, the ecosystem and the problems we are trying to solve.

What’s wrong with one dominant funder?

To some extent, the answer to this is just ‘read about power concentration’. However, I observe at least five major issues with the current situation.

The first is how dependent grantees are on one organisation for their financial health. The decision of a single program officer, formed under uncertainty, can virtually dictate the grantee’s survival. This is unduly risky for the grantee and also has unwanted second order consequences. For example, I have literally been in strategy meetings where organisations have asked “what will Coefficient Giving think of that?”

The second is that the blind spots of the organisation and individual grantmakers can become significant failure points. Even the very best program officers (and Coefficient has many outstanding ones) are also human, with biases, limited hours in the day and imperfect judgement. Especially in areas of high uncertainty, it is incredibly helpful to have grantmakers who can step in if another can’t or won’t. And, while dominant organisations may try to hedge internally against their own missteps, I think it is much easier to do this when the decision-makers are separated structurally. That is, several smart people thinking independently about an issue in different organisations are more likely to hedge effectively than the same smart people in the same team or office.

(As an aside, an ecosystem with a diverse set of large funders is also more attractive to top talent, versus one where there is a ‘party line’ and power is concentrated in a single funder. This will likely be relevant if we want to attract a lot more people to work on causes we care about and increase our ability to deploy money well in these fields, something I intend to post about in the future.)

Third, a single dominant funder is also a single point of failure. We are currently all-in on Coefficient Giving and GiveWell’s reputations and assets. We already saw how incredibly damaging it was when the FTX Foundation collapsed and it was only a relatively small fraction of the ecosystem at the time. I am in no way suggesting any malpractice at either organisation - but I am uncomfortable with relying so completely on their continued good judgement and lack of scandal.

Fourth, it is bad for grantees if a single funder tries to do the majority of grantmaking in a given field, because they are very unlikely to be well-suited to every type of grant. Trying to assess $100m grants alongside $100k seed grants is almost never the right option, because the decision timelines, risk tolerance, due diligence and opportunity costs are completely different at different scales.

At the moment, we expect GiveWell to fund seed grants, mid-stage grants, USAID-collapse-response grants and things at massive scale - but this leads to numerous issues, such as small organisations reporting substantial delays in being evaluated, when they need a rapid review for a grant before their runway expires.

You can instead imagine a pipeline of seed funders and incubators, followed by mid-stage funders who can underwrite growth, before GiveWell funds the best things at serious scale. And this is without even considering that some grantees will have constraints that stop them taking money even from a funder perfectly suited to their stage of life, for example if they want money that is politically-aligned with their other supporters.

Finally, monopsonies also have a dominant function in shaping the market in which they operate. This creates a dominant view of what gets evaluated in the first place (cause areas and organisations), and smaller organisations usually follow their assessments. Unless we assume that their judgement is perfect, and that big organisations can adapt at speed when the situation evolves, this is sub-optimal.

Can GiveWell and Coefficient Giving absorb the windfall?

The two most dominant organisations in the space are making concerted efforts to grow quickly. Both are hiring fast and both are specifically focusing on high-absorption options to deploy more money quickly. They are also outstanding grantmakers and some of the only places with track records of handling hundreds of millions in grants. You can see the attraction for time-poor donors, looking for a safe place to give.

However, the scale of the Funding Anthropalypse is likely to exceed their capacity, even if that capacity increases significantly. Last year, GiveWell regranted $418m, and Coefficient Giving over $1bn. Even with the most aggressive scale-up plan imaginable, it seems unlikely to me that either organisation can even 5x its grantmaking in the next 24 months, and we may be talking about sums far in excess of the $7bn in grants that this would imply ($2bn for GiveWell and $5bn for cG). As an incredibly rough rule of thumb, I am sceptical of any large organisation claiming it can more than double year-on-year, which would imply a ceiling of $2.8bn.

Coefficient themselves acknowledged this bottleneck recently and others have made compelling arguments about an upcoming logjam. It’s also notable that even the Gates Foundation, arguably the best-resourced foundation in history, took roughly 25 years to ramp up to its current annual payout. Scaling up grantmaking is simply very hard to do quickly.

If the Funding Anthropalypse gives more to these two organisations than they can deploy, the most likely outcome is that this money sits on the sidelines for a long time. This is, in my view, a very bad outcome, given that global health has seen a global retrenchment; meat consumption per capita is rising; and many in and around the frontier labs expect very short AI timelines.

Of course, if you are completely ‘time-neutral’, this may not matter to you. I do also think it’s very difficult to judge exactly when and how much to spend now, versus saving capital for potential future opportunities, especially if you think you would need to lower your bar to make grants today. I expect we can all agree, however, that impact shouldn’t be constrained solely by a lack of grantmaker capacity.

Zooming out, this sort of difficult question is the whole point: I think capital sitting in a queue for years would be very bad, but I might be wrong, which is exactly why we want a diversity of decision-makers!

Lastly, even if both organisations defeat my predictions and scale up hugely, this somewhat solves the absorption problem; it only makes the concentration problem worse. So two Coefficient Givings would still beat one, even if the original is twice as big.

Could doubling Coefficient Giving be better?

Although I have come to the firm conclusion that we need more Coefficient Givings, there are strong arguments against my position.

The process of establishing new massive grantmakers will be really messy. It will likely start a talent war, as senior grantmakers are rare and reportedly hard to hire, so new organisations may just poach from existing ones.

Equally, setting up new foundations might not help epistemic diversity much if they just hire from a homogenous talent pool with the same views. However, I think the contention that the only smart, talented people are those already known to or within Effective Altruism doesn’t survive scrutiny, so there is plenty of potential to hire excellent people with diverse viewpoints and significant expertise. For one thing, about 260,000 aid professionals lost their jobs recently, and some of them are already doing excellent things that look very cost-effective.

We should also expect the quality of grantmaking at less experienced foundations to be worse in the short-term. On a pure cost-effectiveness basis, it is likely that GiveWell and Coefficient Giving can deploy money today with the most expertise, experience and analysis of anyone in the space. You also lose efficiencies of scale if you set up multiple organisations to move the same amount of money. The trade-off in both cases is between short-term and long-term consequences.

The coordination costs to multiple actors can also be steep. For example, it is not unheard of for two grantmakers to write large cheques to the same organisation, thus double-funding it, and avoiding this is a cost to both funders.

Maybe most concerning, there is a danger of empowering harmful grantmakers. This is a version of the unilateralist’s curse: when several funders can each act alone, it only takes one - the most optimistic - to back a project. The more independent funders there are, the higher the chance a harmful project finds its single most enthusiastic backer, even if most funders would have said no. This is particularly concerning in AI safety, where you could easily imagine someone accidentally supporting something harmful.

This objection is real and serious. However, this seems to argue for a handful of large, professionally-run funders, but not just one. It’s not obvious to me at all that a single dominant grantmaker is immune from making a harmful call - indeed, the risk of this seems quite acute.

In addition, in a practical sense, we are probably talking about fewer than fifteen peer competitors (say, a foundation for each of Anthropic’s co-founders and significant growth from Longview, AISTOF etc.). There simply isn’t enough money to found a hundred unilateral Coefficient Givings, and a small number of high-quality grantmakers is better-insulated from the curse than hundreds would be.

Lastly, the original paper lays out several remedies, none of which is to empower single decision-makers. Instead, it argues for a principle of conformity (pages 8-9) when dealing with unilateral decisions, and also for judicious information-sharing. A handful of funders who compare notes are barely unilateralists at all; a lone funder, with no peer to check it, is the one actor who can never be talked down.

Ultimately, I do not believe that any of these concerns outweigh the downsides and risks of the status quo, and I think this is a once-in-a-generation chance to fix it.

How has this played out before in global health?

Probably the most famous example of consolidation is Warren Buffett. When he made his 2006 pledge, he committed the bulk of his giving to the Gates Foundation, rather than setting up his own thing. This was widely lauded as an example of putting impact before ego, as it gave the Foundation significantly more resources, without any extra overhead.

I think this is really a cautionary tale, however. If Buffett had set up a similar foundation, of similar size, it would have reduced concentration and increased epistemic diversity. It would also have insulated the ecosystem better against scandal, potentially avoided the frustrations some grantees have with the single foundation, and the Gates Foundation could still have achieved its grantmaking to date from Gates’ own fortune.

It’s also notable that Buffet has since changed his mind, first excluding the Foundation from his legacy, and earlier this month excluding it from his mid-year giving for the first time. Whilst I am not claiming that this was a move driven principally by concerns about power concentration, it’s interesting that the arrangement did not survive as intended.

Where can the next Coefficient Giving come from?

The good news is that even some of the strongest objections to diversity can be mitigated by choosing the right donations.

First, there’s no need to invent new mega foundations from whole cloth. There are many good mid-tier organisations that donors can contribute to, across a variety of cause areas. Most are deploying in the tens of millions and would provide significant value if escalated to the hundreds of millions. To name just a few already directing >$10m/year:

• Longview Philanthropy (existential risk)

• AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund

• EA Animal Welfare Fund (animal welfare)

• DIV Fund (global health)

• Founders Pledge’s Global Health and Development Catalytic Impact Fund

• Navigation Fund (multi-cause)

(This list is not exhaustive and is very loosely vetted on general reputation and places deploying >$10m/year. For more in-depth analysis, please get in touch.)

Indeed, although this isn’t a developed model, I think there is roughly a bellcurve-shaped distribution of size and risk-adjusted effectiveness. That is, at the lower end, funds need to grow or merge to have a significant impact - but once they reach the hundreds of millions per year scale, diversification is a defensible alternative, and at the billions per year, it’s essential.

My own mid-stage global health fund is an example of this. At our present run rate of only $3m per year, we are hardly ‘solving’ the mid-stage valley of death in global health. Indeed, we can’t support even one late mid-stage organisation in a significant way. At $50m-$100m, however, we could be a major force for good, but we wouldn’t want to be the only player of that size. A world where we operate at that level alongside DIV Fund, Livelihood Impact Fund and others seems optimal.

I also want to be clear: I definitely do not want Coefficient Giving or GiveWell to shrink. They are tremendously successful grantmakers who have done an enormous amount of good, shaping entire fields for the better.

My answer is instead to create counterweights and coordinating peers, who can take the opposite side of 60:40 calls, diversify grantees’ risk, make grants on asynchronous timelines and fund things the others can’t, won’t or shouldn’t (such as 501(c)(4) activity, for example).

As Coefficient Giving put it themselves: “when external funders come to us for advice on giving, we are typically able to recommend funding opportunities that we believe are 2-5x as cost-effective as Good Ventures’ marginal AI safety funding.”

What should I do with my AI windfall?

If you are someone who expects to come into AI wealth, you can be an active part of the solution (provided you can see past the incessant noise about your philanthropy).

My strongest piece of advice is to diversify your own grantmaking plans. You have the luxury of being able to use outstanding grantmakers like GiveWell and Coefficient Giving, while also supporting a handful of other actors to grow and de-risk the ecosystem. You can do this whether you have $10m to give or $100m - and, indeed, at this scale, you might be particularly well-suited to supporting smaller funds and grantmakers alongside other donors. You might also effectively unlock matched giving, to augment your resources.

If you are a particularly large philanthropist, you have an even bigger opportunity to build something that might be a genuine counterweight to the biggest existing organisations. This applies most obviously to the companies’ co-founders, the OpenAI Foundation and the Long Term Benefit Trust at Anthropic - mathematically, these are the only places that can rival the resources of Good Ventures as actual peers. However, I think anyone contemplating over $100m in giving should give serious thought to seeding or building a new vehicle, at least with part of their resources and especially if they can do it with a few other donors of the same size. This is admittedly a marginal call at the nine-figure scale, and I would recommend reading these existing resources and sourcing bespoke advice before committing.

In general, deciding the right split between existing, scaling and new allocators is very difficult, and this is what advisors are for. As someone who runs an advisory and has a fledgling fund, I obviously have conflicts of interest here. Accordingly, I would discount the above appropriately, stress test the arguments and consider a range of advice.

For free advice on where to get help, including pointing you to others in the space who are better-placed than me, please get in touch.

Jack Lewars is the founder of Ultra Philanthropy, an independent advisory that helps major donors give for maximum impact, and fund manager of its mid-stage global health fund. He advises donors giving up to nine figures a year, and is Chair of Trustees at High Impact Athletes. Talk to him about your giving.

Thanks to Jakob Graabak, Olivia Kaye and Patrick Kaczmarek for their review, suggestions and feedback. I also used Claude to help structure my thoughts and to suggest improvements and gaps, as well as for proofreading; all views, primary drafting and final edits are mine.

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. Here's why, and what to do instead.

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.

As someone who has thought a lot about the Funding Anthropalypse (hat tip to Pablo Melchor for the name), I want to suggest ways for projects to access some of the $37bn+ in donations that could be available next year. In short - become ‘legibly excellent’ to ants.

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 emails are being scraped and even reverse engineered. This at least implies that charity leaders believe it’s an effective fundraising strategy to pitch anyone with an @anthropic email address.

I apologise in advance if this sounds patronising, but please do not do this. 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 success with these donors?

Make it your mission to be ‘legibly excellent’ to them.

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.

In terms of excellence: the most credible way to demonstrate this is to be highly rated by 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 intermediaries, as they prioritise evidence-based, cost-effective organisations. (Indeed, by becoming more legible to AI employees, you will also become more legible and higher-scoring with these evaluators.)

If getting onto the radar of these organisations isn’t feasible, develop your internal legibility through a thorough theory of change, solid monitoring and evaluation to track your outputs and outcomes, and a strong understanding of the evidence base for your intervention. That way, you’ll have a compelling suite of things to show any prospective donor.

I also recommend having a credible and thought-through plan for scaling. Absorption capacity is going to be a major challenge of such a huge philanthropic windfall - with so many donors concentrating in the same areas, it is likely that most projects will quickly be funded at their current scale. You can differentiate yourself by having a credible plan for growth, including the extra non-delivery staffing you might need (CFO, HR function, an MD to keep the engine running smoothly, enough monitoring capacity and sophistication that you can accurately tell what’s happening on the ground).

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, such as the DIV Fund, Mulago, the Prevail Fund and Ultra Philanthropy’s Mid-Stage Global Health Fund (which I myself run, to declare a conflict of interest). Each of these 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 confidentially filed a draft 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.

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, I still urge you not to start cold emailing people 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 advisor, 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 a shared responsibility not to make this an exhausting, unpleasant experience for donors, in ways that could really damage the ecosystem in the medium term.

I’m locked out, so why shouldn’t I just email them anyway?

I am aware that many nonprofit leaders are desperate for funding, and that it would be professional malpractice not to react to an incoming surge of funding. Posts like this will also compound issues of unequal access to wealth and wealth holders - if you don’t know someone who knows someone, how can you raise awareness?

I think it’s possible for anyone to develop relationships with AI equity holders in non-transactional ways. “Develop relationships” doesn’t require you to know anyone at the company already. As you build your excellent and legible organisation, you can present it where AI staff and advisors will find it: via evaluators; at philanthropic conferences; in think pieces; on podcasts.

(You could even, say, start a Substack and post a lot of things that aren’t in your personal financial interest. But probably don’t do that, I doubt it’ll work.)

This is more work than asking Claude to shoot off 50 cold emails, but it has a much higher chance of being effective, and it avoids the harmful downsides of firing emails into the void.

I’m an AI equity holder and I’m overwhelmed. Who can help me with my philanthropy?

My intention with this Substack 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 promoting my own interests.

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, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Pledge, Regeneration Group. I would recommend them to anyone.

For a second, personalised opinion on your giving, or to promote a plurality of views across the ecosystem, consider a boutique advisory or subject matter specialist: Senterra Funders, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Bedrock Philanthropy, (my own) Ultra Philanthropy. I’d argue the ecosystem needs more of these, not fewer: two Coefficient Givings beat one that’s twice as big.

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.

Jack Lewars is the founder of Ultra Philanthropy, an independent advisory that helps major donors give for maximum impact, and fund manager of its mid-stage global health fund. He advises donors giving up to nine figures a year, and is Chair of Trustees at High Impact Athletes. Talk to him about your giving.

I used Claude to help structure my thoughts and to suggest improvements and gaps, as well as for proofreading; all views, primary drafting and final edits are mine.

The Funding Anthropalypse is the expected wave of philanthropy from equity holders in frontier AI labs (not just Anthropic). This is likely to change the face of philanthropy because of its sheer size, expected to be in the tens or hundreds of billions. The philanthropic ecosystem is not yet ready for this windfall, but we can give it a fighting chance with urgent action.

I’m Jack Lewars, the founder of Ultra Philanthropy. UP is an independent advisory that helps major donors - increasingly from tech and AI - give for maximum impact. I’m also fund manager of its mid-stage global health fund and Chair of Trustees at High Impact Athletes.

The Funding Anthropalypse is what I call an expected wave of philanthropy from people who founded or work for frontier AI labs.

To start off with, this will most likely be Anthropic and OpenAI, because each of them has confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC, the first step to going public. In the next few years, however, AI has the potential to mint millionaires and billionaires at an unprecedented rate, so we may see many more donors and much more money coming online.

Will Anthropic and OpenAI staff donate?

At least in the case of Anthropic, we pretty much know for certain that large donations are coming. Early staff were incentivised with a 3:1 match from the company if they put private shares into a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) (and later staff still receive 1:1 matching). There is much speculation as to the size of this DAF, but it is undoubtedly in the billions of dollars, as the company’s valuation has skyrocketed since those early days.

Money or equity held in a DAF cannot be withdrawn; it can only be granted to registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits in the US, or something the DAF provider accepts as equivalent overseas (e.g. a charity registered in England & Wales that meets the IRS requirements of a nonprofit). This means that, one way or another, this money is being donated at some point. There is no legal way (or, at least, nothing that isn’t extremely sketchy) to use the money except for charitable grants.

In addition, many staff joined these companies specifically because they were effective altruists, and a key tenet of EA is giving away money you don’t need. They are therefore highly likely to give even more than is already in this DAF, with many staff pledging 80% of any money they make to charity.

And that’s without even mentioning the founders, each of whom owns tens of billions of dollars in equity, and has pledged to give away 80% of their wealth; or OpenAI’s Foundation, which owns 26% of the company, currently worth hundreds of billions.

OpenAI is similarly stacked with Effective Altruists. In general, I expect the actions of these market leaders to influence a wide range of AI companies, and to set a precedent for sharing the immense wealth that this field will probably generate. I also think the speed at which AI companies can generate wealth to increase the openness of founders and staff to philanthropy.

Why is this a Funding Anthropalypse?

This is philanthropy at historic levels. Nan Ransohoff gives some useful perspective, assuming $50bn per year comes online:

$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)

Ransohoff’s figures don’t completely add up (for example, 67 Coefficient Givings at ~$1bn is nearer $67bn than $50bn) and there is a lot of doubt about the exact amounts of money at stake. However, even if you doubt the exact figures, even 10% of this money would completely rewrite the rules. The biggest organisations in cost-effective philanthropy, like Coefficient Giving and GiveWell, deploy only a fraction of the expected windfall (as do the largest foundations in the whole world). Even if the biggest grantmakers in EA grow substantially, there is going to be more funding available than most of us have ever seen in this corner of philanthropy.

Where should Anthropic employees give their windfall?

This is the centibillion dollar question. We strongly expect the ‘traditional’ effective altruist causes to get enormous support: global health and wellbeing; animal welfare; existential risk, whether from AI or biorisk or something else; plausibly climate change.

The conventional wisdom is that this will be almost all of the employees’ donations, but I disagree. I expect many employees to have or develop a reasonably long list of causes of interest. Some of this will be because they suddenly have $100m in their DAF, and so a few ‘warm fuzzies’ donations seem fine. Some of it will be because there are many things of value that are not easily captured by EA’s focus on measurability and cost-effectiveness, like justice, racial justice, the arts, democracy protection, abortion access and so on. Some (potentially a lot) will be to offset the predicted near-term harms of the AI revolution, such as widespread job losses.

And some will be because, at least at the moment, the cost-effectiveness giving ecosystem is not ready for this amount of money.

According to unpublished data from Giving What We Can, cost-effective giving moved about $2bn last year. This means that, even if every organisation in the space grew 5x next year, it would still only handle a fraction of the expected windfall. And, as wise people have pointed out, growing 5x is incredibly hard, and sometimes actually impossible.

Accordingly, unless urgent action is taken, I expect a fair chunk of the philanthropy to go elsewhere, if the donors are eager to donate now, rather than waiting for the ecosystem to catch up.

What can we do to help Anthropic and OpenAI equity holders donate well?

We need several types of action to help equity holders donate effectively, if we accept two things:

1. In general, giving according to cost-effectiveness is a good way to decide where to give, given the overwhelming number of causes we could support.

2. The traditional recipients of EA donations will quickly have more money than they can distribute.

This funding wave is epoch-defining. We therefore need action to match its scale. For example:

• We should invest now in researchers and evaluators. I generally believe that you can find something cost-effective in almost any cause area. I believe particularly strongly that there are thousands of highly cost-effective interventions that are undiscovered in global health and similar areas. No sane person would argue that this amount of money can ‘end poverty’ (given that USAID was managing $35bn each year before it was dismantled). More researchers and evaluators can find these hidden gems and direct money to them next year.

• We should invest in projects that can actually scale. Notwithstanding the difficulties of scaling, some projects have the potential to move billions of dollars. Even if they are not currently ‘above the bar’, we should expect the bar to fall as the supply of money dramatically increases. Absorption capacity and scalability are now almost as important as cost-effectiveness (something I focus on deliberately in the mid-stage of global health).

• We should work to avoid creating or reinforcing damaging monopolies in cost-effective giving. I will write more on this in future posts, but in short: monopolies (or, in this case, monopsonies) are almost always bad. They are bad for the charities that need grants from them, because they become the only opinion that matters, expose the charities to risks from receiving all their money from one place and cause enormous harm if they collapse; and they are bad for donors because they have blind spots, restrict donor choice in finding a second opinion on their giving and make it harder for competitors to enter the market. Put simply, Two Coefficient Givings beat one twice as big. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a thriving, diverse ecosystem of mega funders, in a way that will de-risk and improve cost-effective giving for generations. We need to take it, while respecting those organisations that already have formidable track records and expert teams. Thankfully, there is enough money to do both with room to spare.

This list is not exhaustive but it is a start. This Substack is intended to bring these discussions into the open, and offer advice to grantmakers, evaluators, advisors and donors as we enter the Funding Anthropalypse.

Who can advise on giving after a tech or AI windfall?

Part of my goal is to discuss openly and honestly the challenges of such a huge philanthropic windfall. At the same time, however, I aim to give everyone involved the best advice I can, striving to be impartial. Accordingly, if this is a live issue for you, I suggest contacting one of the following. For free, impartial advice, or help choosing, please reach out to me.

Not listed in any particular order, and tiered by size:

The biggest current organisations

• GiveWell (global health and wellbeing)

• Coefficient Giving (multiple cause areas)

• Longview Philanthropy (existential and long-term risk)

• Founders Pledge (multi-cause)

Slightly smaller, but with a strong history

• EA Animal Welfare Fund

• Regeneration Group (multi-cause)

• Senterra Funders (animal welfare)

• AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund (AISTOF)

• Animal Charity Evaluators

• The Life You Can Save (global health and wellbeing)

Boutique advisors (especially if you want to diversify the ecosystem)

• Ultra Philanthropy (multi-cause, but principally global health - my own advisory, so conflict of interest warning)

• Ellis Impact (multi-cause)

• Bedrock Philanthropy (multi-cause)

I used Claude to give feedback and for proofreading; all views, primary drafting and final edits are mine.