What is the Funding Anthropalypse?
What the coming wave of Anthropic and OpenAI philanthropy means for giving, and how to do it well.
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Money or equity held in a DAF cannot be withdrawn; it can only be granted to registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits in the US, or something the DAF provider accepts as equivalent overseas (e.g. a charity registered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:
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.
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
Regeneration Group (multi-cause)
Senterra Funders (animal welfare)
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.