How (not) to fundraise from Anthropic staff

There are things you can do to become excellent to AI wealth holders. Cold emailing isn't one of them.

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.

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 - strongly worth a read in its own right)

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.