I think this is broadly correct. My sense is that funders in the space are starting to think about what to do in light of Anthropic dollars, but not a lot of concrete things have started happening yet.
Beyond other e2g folks starting to donate more now, I think other things that start to make sense include:
- Fieldbuilding now (eg new orgs, incubators, fellowships, recruiting, outreach) so that the funds have good opportunities to go to
- Designing funding institutions that scale to handle 10x to 100x the number dollars, and also the number of "principals" (since I expect, as opposed to OP having a single Dustin, Anthropic will produce something like 50-100 folks with 10Ms-100Ms to donate)
Revisiting ideas from the FTX Future Fund era: prizes, for-profit norms, ambitious scaleable uses of funds, moonshots
Designing funding institutions that scale to handle 10x to 100x the number dollars, and also the number of "principals" (since I expect, as opposed to OP having a single Dustin, Anthropic will produce something like 50-100 folks with 10Ms-100Ms to donate)
Seems plausible that a decent part of Coefficient Giving's new strategy exactly supports this model.
3I'd be especially interested in Angel investors funding early stage EA-aligned high risk moonshots that will need Series A funding in a year if successful - but it likely requires risk neutral, low regret funders, or people funding an entire portfolio, both of which are rare.
Do we have the numbers?
- what percentage of anthropic shares are owned by employees?
- Of those what percentage are owned by EA pulled employees?
- Of those how many which actually translate their words into actions once they have the money?
- What percentage do we expect them to give, and over what time frame?
- How does that compare to current EA related funding?
Making up random numbers (I've done zero research)
- Not more than 50 billion owned by employeess
- Not more than 20 billion owned by EA employees
- 75% will put their money where their mouth is
- And donate 50%. If they spread that over 20 years, at current interest rates that's about 500 million a year
- Givewell raised 400 million last year. Not all of that is from EAs, but not all EAs donated there. Let's say total of 500 million.
Then if this all happens it about doubles fundings for EA related causes. Is a reasonable chance of that happening worth upfronting donations for?
This is a good way to think about it although I think your numbers are way too high
And donate 50%
This number in particular is 10x too high IMO. Virtually nobody donates 50%. EA Survey shows that the median self-identified earner-to-give only donates about 5% of their income (IIRC, I can't find the data now)
If they spread that over 20 years, at current interest rates that's about 500 million a year
I expect the giving to be more front-loaded than that because a lot of Anthropic employees have short timelines
Another consideration is that money is disproportionately held by people who are high up in the company, who I would guess are more selfish than average which means lower donations
Your made-up numbers came up with $7.5B donated over 20 years. My guess is the total amount donated will be more like $250M–$1B but heavily front-loaded, so perhaps $100M in the first few years and then much less thereafter
My understanding is that for most of Anthropic's existence (though this is no longer true), there was an option when you joined to pledge some fraction of your equity (up to 50%) to give to non-profits, and then Anthropic would match that 3:1.
This is an unusually strong incentive to pledge a bunch of money to charity up-front, and of course the 3x-ing of that money will straightforwardly bring up the amount of money donated. I think this pledge is legally binding, because of the equity already having been transferred to a DAF. But I'm not confident in that, and it'd be good to get that confirmed.
(I'd also be interested to hear vibes-y estimate from anthropic employees about how many people took that deal.)
Also, all of the Anthropic founders pledged to donate 80% of their equity, according to Zach here, second-hand from an Anthropic person. (Though apparently this pledge is not legally binding.) Forbes estimates 7 Anthropic cofounders to be worth $3.7B each.
So I think way more than $1B is set-aside for donating (and that this will be increasing, because I expect Anthropic's valuation to increase).
That said, I am pretty worried that giving away large amounts of money requires a bunch of thinking, that Anthropic employees will be very busy, and that a lot of them might procrastinate their donation decisions until the singularity has come and gone. Empirically, it's common for billionaires to pledge a bunch of money to charity and then be very slow at giving it away.
Probably that risk is at least somewhat sensitive to how many obviously good donation opportunities there are that can absorb a lot of money.
money is disproportionately held by people who are high up in the company, who I would guess are more selfish than average which means lower donations
My guess would go the other way:
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A lot of the early employees and higher-ups have EA-ish perspectives (ex: one of the Amodeis joined GWWC in 2010; the other is married to Holden Karnofsky), and I'd expect this fraction to decrease as you get into more recent employees.
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Each additional dollar you have gives a decreasing impact via improving your lifestyle. I've become substantially less selfish percentage-wise as my net worth has increased.
the median self-identified earner-to-give only donates about 5% of their income (IIRC, I can't find the data now)
isn't that brought down by students?
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 PhilanthropyCoefficient 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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