Coefficient Giving just gave GiveWell $1 billion. Where should other donors give now?
If you give in the thousands, I wouldn’t change. If you give in the millions, you should consider it.
Coefficient Giving (cG) increased their 2026 commitment to GiveWell from $175m to $1bn this week. Both organisations have reduced their funding bars this year, and cG says they are spending against anticipated giving from “extremely volatile assets”. Where should other donors give in light of this news?
I think the answer depends on size. For donors giving thousands, not much has changed. For donors giving millions, a lot has.
We should expect much more of this as the Funding Anthropalypse unfolds.
What just happened with GiveWell and Coefficient Giving?
Coefficient Giving announced a $1 billion gift to GiveWell on 23rd July (just two days after I posted about power concentration in effective giving). This increases a previous commitment of $175m for 2026. The announcement, from Alexander Berger and Otis Reid, says they made the decision essentially based on uncertain predictions about future funding. In particular, they think donating now will do more good than donating later, which is reflected in the fact that both organisations have lowered their funding thresholds this year (GiveWell from 8x their benchmark to 6x, Coefficient from 2,000x their benchmark to 1,000x - these are different scales, but cG reckons its 1,000x is roughly 4.5x in GiveWell’s units).
This is a huge increase in cG’s support for GiveWell, nearly doubling the amount they have given to GiveWell’s recommendations over the last decade. That’s ten years of donations, from GiveWell’s single biggest funder, nearly doubled in one gift. I expect this to do a great deal of good.
Although cG says that this could be a one-off surge, it has implications for other donors either way. GiveWell’s announcement says that they think their grantmaking “is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year”. However, even if GiveWell meets that aspiration, cG’s gift is roughly the size of everything GiveWell expects to grant this year, before you count gifts from other donors or funds already rolled over from previous years. (cG frames this as their allocation “for 2026”; GiveWell calls it a “near-term” commitment, so some may be deployed over more than one year. I take cG at their word and treat it as this year’s money.)
Why did Coefficient Giving give $1 billion to GiveWell?
cG’s reasoning is multifaceted. In short, they anticipate large increases in future funding and are spending now against that expectation. This is both to buy marginal impact at current rates (because an influx of future funding would probably fill the most cost-effective opportunities) and also to prepare GiveWell and their grantees for this funding surge.
They don’t specifically mention AI wealth, but it’s fairly clear what they mean: “much of the future funding we’re anticipating depends on the valuations of some extremely volatile assets.”
Intriguingly, part of their thinking rests on the possibility that advances in AI could make the world so much richer that it reduces the need for global health and development giving altogether.
This is the first major example of how the Funding Anthropalypse will reshape the world. In essence, AI wealth and short AI timelines are now setting budgets for bednets, vitamin-A distribution and vaccination incentives.
Should I still give to GiveWell?
There is still an extremely compelling case to give to GiveWell. They remain the most rigorous, transparent funder in cost-effective global health giving; even with this increase, their budget will still be roughly ~⅛ that of the Gates Foundation; and 6x GiveWell’s benchmark is still some of the best marginal cost-effectiveness a normal donor can buy.
It’s also notable that GiveWell has itself committed to tell donors if it thinks their money should go elsewhere. Given their market-leading commitment to transparency, I think we should cautiously trust them on this.
Accordingly, if you are giving GiveWell thousands each year, I would stay as you are. You’ll get excellent outcomes from your giving - and, practically speaking, you don’t have a big enough lever to substantially alter the field, or to justify in-depth, bespoke advice on how to do that.
Does my donation still count now that big money is arriving?
Yes, it does. At the sector level, this amount of money is nowhere near enough to end extreme poverty or preventable under-5 mortality. The United States alone gave $37.3 billion less in overseas development assistance in 2025, compared to 2024, so this extra donation doesn’t even touch the sides. Even if the Funding Anthropalypse materialises, we are orders of magnitude short of the money needed to achieve a truly just world.
Even within cost-effective global giving, as cG themselves argue in their announcement, donations now help GiveWell to fund great projects and build their own capacity to do more good in the future. Although their bar has fallen, projects that are 6x GiveWell’s benchmark remain outstandingly good.
The bar hasn’t fallen because the things we can fund got worse - it fell because money is arriving more quickly than we can find opportunities.
What should large donors do following GiveWell’s $1 billion gift?
If you are giving millions of dollars this year, the highest impact move is probably not adding to GiveWell’s margin. Instead, it is to build the capacity that will help to absorb next year’s likely windfall.
Indeed, cG themselves say that they are “betting that other funders will pick up the baton for future giving.” They even concede that, with GiveWell’s marginal cost-effectiveness now lower, “some funders might be put off by that and want to allocate their funding elsewhere instead” - a reaction they call, to some degree, “perfectly rational.” cG has now given GiveWell an amount roughly equal to its expected grantmaking for the year, so the marginal large gift to GiveWell buys less than it used to. In my view, the highest-leverage way to pick up that baton is not to add to GiveWell’s expected surplus, but to build the absorption capacity that lets next year’s windfall land well - the very thing cG says it is racing to create.
This is a topic I specifically advise donors on, including AI wealth. It’s not a question of marginal cost-effectiveness. Instead, it’s about how much future capacity a dollar today will unlock. The following are options I found in my own research, in rough order of their ability to create new absorption capacity next year:
Fund operating costs for capacity-constrained funds. As more funding arrives, most of the great projects we already know about will be funded up to their marginal cost-effectiveness. We therefore need to be able to unearth more opportunities, at every stage of the pipeline. The binding constraint is likely to shift from available funds to available projects. It is therefore highly effective to fund more research capacity for smaller funds. An example is the Happier Lives Institute, which is currently raising operating costs to expand its research. My own analysis suggests that modest operating grants here could unlock very large sums in cost-effective wellbeing interventions; I’m happy to share the figures with donors on request. There are also fledgling evaluators in livelihoods, gender-based violence, humanitarian response and global health policy, and each one should unearth new giving opportunities.
Give regranting capital to smaller cost-effectiveness funds. How much a fund receives next is likely to be correlated with how much it regrants this year - donors don’t typically give tens of millions to funds that have only managed single-digit millions to date. For example, the DIV Fund has so far raised around $48m to deploy over four years; helping it move materially more than that in its first year will give it a stronger track record with which to raise much larger sums in the future. Likewise, my own Mid-stage Global Health Fund is on track to move $6m this year, but increasing that to $10m+ would move us to a different level. (Please note the obvious conflict of interest in me recommending my own fund.)
Fund incubator and seed prizes, to create lots more organisations that could scale. Large grants, which GiveWell expects to move towards, are ultimately reliant on a healthy pipeline of startups. Ambitious Impact has already launched numerous cost-effective charities, many of which are now GiveWell funded (Suvita, Ansh, Taimaka, Lafiya, Family Empowerment Media etc.). D-Prize seeds more ventures than anything else in the ecosystem and has a strong historical record of those interventions scaling (8% go on to reach >100,000 people). They could both do more, with more.
Fund things that GiveWell doesn’t specialise in. At present, the ecosystem often looks to GiveWell to fund everything - seed grants, mid-stage grants, USAID-response grants, massive scale grants. However, no one can specialise in all things, and it would be better for grantees (and less risky) if more specialist funders existed. That includes specialist seed grants from places like AIM, specialist mid-stage grants from places like Ultra Philanthropy and DIV, catalytic funding from places like Founders Pledge, and so on. Each specialist funder can then design its processes, evidence requirements, risk tolerance, turnaround time etc. to suit its specific tranche. I strongly encourage donors to support these varied specialists. You can also invest in important things that fall outside GiveWell’s predominant focus on under-5 mortality, such as education or wellbeing.
Take a risk on something new that could grow rapidly. These grants require the highest risk tolerance, but there are implementing organisations with ambitious plans to reach serious scale, such as Evidence Action’s internal accelerator or Sanku, whose new TED talk sets out a vision to reach a billion people (it currently reaches around 70 million, having grown from one million after a single unrestricted gift from MacKenzie Scott). Likewise, there are several interesting proposals for deploying AI in global health. Most are not public (get in touch if you want to know more), but one that is public is the AI Access Initiative, incubated by Evidence Action.
Each of these options builds the absorption capacity of the field as a whole and de-risks the ecosystem, ensuring a richer pipeline of opportunities for payers at scale like GiveWell. And now that GiveWell is practically guaranteed to receive more this year than it can re-grant at its own bar, large donors should take these options seriously.
Of course, you should note throughout that I have a conflict of interest in recommending some of these options, as an operator in this space myself via the Mid-stage Global Health Fund. Discount accordingly.
What does this mean for power concentration in effective giving?
Well, it didn’t make it better.
The biggest (or second biggest, depending on where you draw the boundary) funder in cost-effective global health just roughly tripled its expected grantmaking this year, from around $418m in 2025 to a likely $1bn-$1.5bn in 2026. The next biggest funder in the space gives in the double-digit millions. If you took this risk seriously last week, you should take it even more seriously now.
It’s also interesting to map who depends on whom. cG and GiveWell are the two largest players in cost-effective giving, and they are not independent: cG’s new commitment is roughly the size of everything GiveWell expects to grant this year. So the field’s two biggest institutions are now even more closely linked, and to a great extent their outlooks are dependent on the same set of “volatile assets”. This isn’t diversification. It is the opposite: the two largest funders in effective giving are now exposed to the same volatile source at the same time.
cG themselves acknowledge that this could be a one-off surge, and that the future funding they are counting on might not materialise. So the sector’s two largest flows now depend on volatile asset prices, on cG’s ability to predict the future, and on how it sets its own funding bars from one year to the next.
I expect the $1 billion gift to GiveWell to be an outstanding grant at the object level, funding highly cost-effective programmes that do an enormous amount of good for very little money. This excellent grant does nothing to address the fragile architecture of this space. In fact, it makes the risks significantly worse.
I am expecting a windfall this year. What should I do?
My advice has not substantially changed from the post I wrote about power concentration just a few days ago. The only difference is that I believe my thesis has been somewhat validated by this news.
Accordingly, any donor giving seven figures or more, and even some donors in the six-figure category, should at least consider splitting their donation between GiveWell (where they will get excellent marginal cost-effectiveness) and building the ecosystem, exactly as cG called for in their announcement post.
This is a rare chance for donors to improve the ecosystem for grantees and, in doing so, to do more good on the ground.
If you would like advice specific to your circumstances and goals, from me or from someone I would recommend, 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.
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.