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Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
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. Despite previous attempts to discourage it, this is still happening, and EA needs to do better on this as a community.
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.Â
Every person in the chat started sending their own charity/fund/pet project (including me, in fairness) and the questioner was immediately overwhelmed. Disappointingly, many of the suggestions explicitly did not fit the brief from the person asking, and were fairly obvious attempts to crowbar pet projects into scope.
As someone who has thought a lot about the Funding Anthropalypse (hat tip to @Pablo Melchor 𸠠for the name), I want to suggest a better way for projects to access some of the $37bn+ in donations that could be in play next year. In short - become âlegibly excellentâ to Anthropic staff.
Do not cold email them.
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 email addresses are being scraped and even reverse-engineered. This at least implies that EAs believe itâs an effective fundraising strategy to pitch anyone with an @anthropic email address.Â
Of course, many people on here are experienced and adept fundraisers, so you can bypass this advice if it doesn't apply to you - but it is also true that many folks in EA have only ever fundraised within the EA bubble, and so do not have expertise in fundraising conventions and norms.
I apologise in advance if this sounds patronising, but people have tried gently making the case against this before, and it doesn't seem to be working.
Accordingly, I want to say clearly:Â please do not cold pitch people.
It has next to no chance of working, it has harmful side effects and it actively damages your personal chances of receiving funding. Â
In the past year, donors working inside frontier AI labs have started routing large global health gifts to me to place. Iâm currently advising on a multi-year, eight-figure global health allocation across a set of vetted funds. My advice for engaging these donors?
Make it your mission to be âlegibly excellentâ 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.Â
Justin Steele, EA Forum
I think Justinâs 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 EA-aligned 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 grantmakers.
Second, and less common in this ecosystem, have a credible and thought-through plan for scaling. Absorption capacity is going to be a major challenge of such a huge philanthropic windfall, especially with most donors focusing on the traditional EA cause areas. A great way to differentiate yourself is having a credible plan for growth.Â
As the fund manager of the Mid-Stage Global Health Fund, I have spent a year funding and assisting organisations to scale, and I think there are some systematically neglected aspects to this in EA.Â
One is sufficient focus on general managers, with many organisations expecting founders to be the Managing Director and Chief of Staff, alongside fundraising, strategy, implementation etc. This overburdens them and often doesn't reflect their comparative advantage.
Another is neglecting solid back-office functions, such as CFOs, an HR function and decent operations generalists.
There are also enormous pitfalls to scaling without sufficient monitoring capacity (that is, specifically monitoring, as opposed to monitoring and evaluation). As your organisation goes from the founders knowing everyone personally to a 100-person team, you need monitoring systems that tell you accurately what is happening on the frontline. Otherwise, your impact may not be what you hoped.
All of these things are often neglected to preserve organisational leanness, which can improve your cost-effectiveness - but in a world of funding abundance, organisations that adequately cost and staff their expansion plans are more likely to stand out than those that try to grow on a shoestring. (We should also expect the funding bar in all areas to fall, as the supply of money grows, so you probably have more wiggle room on cost-effectiveness anyway.)
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. At least in global health and wellbeing, this includes the DIV Fund, Mulago, the Prevail Fund and my own Mid-Stage Global Health Fund. They may be willing to offer advice.
Actually more than you think. The two major IPOs in the pipeline are Anthropic and OpenAI. Each has filed its 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.
I would start now, though.
You might think that people can just ignore emails they donât like. Or even that receiving incessant pitches is a small price for being a newly minted millionaire.
However, the community needs to stop doing this 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 donât 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 adviser, I receive multiple pitches each week, and itâs my full-time job to assess them - and yet the most common unread email in my inbox is âthat project that I havenât got around to yetâ.
This does require some collective discipline - itâs hard to do the slow work of building an amazing organisation and generating awareness of your work. But there is some shared responsibility not to make this an exhausting, unpleasant experience for donors, in ways that could really damage the ecosystem in the medium term.
To put this in explicitly EA terms: the expected value of cold emailing is negative, for you personally and for the ecosystem as a whole. The community is currently seriously failing this test, and it's disappointing.
My intention with my Substack and related forum posting is to offer useful advice and perspective on a major philanthropic event. Accordingly, Iâm going to highlight organisations doing good work and offer the best advice I can, as far as possible without veering towards my self-interest in these topics.
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, EA Funds, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Pledge, Regeneration Group.Â
For a second, personalised opinion on your giving, or to promote a plurality of views across the ecosystem, consider a boutique advisory like Bedrock Philanthropy or my own Ultra Philanthropy. I'd argue the ecosystem needs to build these up more, to offer greater pluralism of views and approaches. In short, two Coefficient Givings beat one that's twice as big, so we should try to create as many as possible.
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.
Subscribe to my Substack to follow the whole series of posts, including why we want many Coefficient Givings, the donor-adviser matching tool I'm building, and what to fund once the traditional behemoths have no room for more funding left.
