There's also an important question about which EA causes are differentially more or less likely to be funded. If you think Pause AI is good, Anthropic's IPO probably won't help. If you think mechanistic interpretability is valuable, it might help to fund more training in relevant areas, but you should expect an influx of funding soon. And if you think animal welfare is important, funding new high risk startups that can take advantage of wave of funding in a year may be an especially promising bet.

Note that Anthropic employees can liquidate significant amounts of equity even without an IPO if Anthropic decides to run a major secondary share sale. OpenAI employees recently sold $6.6 billion in shares. 

Good note. Also worth keeping in mind the base rate of companies going under. FTX committing massive fraud was weird; but a young, fast-growing, unprofitable company blowing up was decidedly predictable, and IMO the EA community was banking too hard on FTX money being real.

Plus the planning fallacy, i.e., if someone says they want to do something by some date, then it'll probably happen later than that.

My off-the-cuff guess is

• 30% chance Anthropic IPOs by end of 2028
• 20% chance Anthropic IPOs in 2029 or later
• 50% chance Anthropic never IPOs—because they go under for normal business-y reasons, or they build AGI first, or we're all dead, or whatever

I'm super encouraged that you think a large amount of money will flow in to good causes from Anthropic employees. I really hope you are right, although I think there's likely to be moderate-heavy disappointment on the Anthropic/Giving front. 

Maintaining radical generosity and the altruistic values you used to have on the path to riches is really difficult. Most people unfortunately will become far more selfish, and rationalise keeping money they previously intended to give away. Rare cases like Moskowitz have shown its possible, but there are surprisingly few cases of young people (under 40) giving away millions after a cash windfall, let alone tens of millions. I'm not blaming anyone here at all, just stating an observation.

On the other hand I'm encouraged by cases like @richard_ngo that do distribute good amounts of riches that come in. So its difficult but possible!

 

I’m somewhat surprised about the lack of information about Anthropic employee’s donation plans.

Potential reasons:

• They are all working full-time (probably more) and it’s really hard to get clarity on your own donation plans in such a situation. And communicating about them is even harder.
• They might have specific plans but talking about them publicly is tricky. It might imply information about Anthropics plans (e.g. regarding IPO) or about the internal sentiment about the prospect of Anthropic gaining/losing value in the future. Or just plain old 'what happens to your inbox once you imply that you're going to be donating >10M soon?'.
• They might not see a lot of benefit of communicating publicly about this. Maybe they are chatting with Coefficient Giving about their plans. Maybe they are planning their own foundation.
• There might just not be that many people with significant wealth at Anthropic who are planning on donating effectively anytime soon. This could be because of value drift, because they expect their assets to increase in value and want to donate later, because they don’t see great donation opportunities yet.

Interested to hear whether I’ve missed a major consideration and whether people have takes about which of these reasons is most likely/explanatory.

I think there’s something like a, I don’t know, maybe 95% chance the AI industry is in a bubble. (I explained the evidence and reasoning for this at length here.) I have no idea how an AI bubble popping might affect the likelihood or the timing of an IPO. I strongly believe the bubble will pop eventually, but I have no idea when — everyone agrees you can’t time the market and you can’t time bubbles. I also have no idea when (or even if) Anthropic is planning to do an IPO. There’s so much complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. So, I don’t know how the probability of a bubble would affect your personal donation decisions.

Another thing that’s uncertain is how severe the bubble pop will be. Let’s say we think that Anthropic is valued at $300 billion or $350 billion now. Anthropic could get absolutely decimated on valuation and go down to, say, $100 billion. But the founders’ and early employees’ equity would still be worth billions. [Edit: to clarify, I'm not predicting this, just giving an example of how even a huge drop in valuation would still leave the founders/early employees very rich.]

If you are considering global health, helping the GiveWell All Grants Fund filling the most high impact programs affected by large US & European aid cuts the past couple years may be more significant than whether Anthropic employees donate a lot of money soon.

Thanks for the post, Jeff!

At a floated $300B valuation and many EAs among their early employees, the amount of additional funding could be in the billions. [...]

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.

EA-related funding is around 900 M$/year. So thinking about donations to one's top organisationg becoming 10 (= 10*10^6/(1*10^6)) times as large would make sense for expected EA-related funding in 2026 of 9 billion $ (= 10*900*10^6), 3 % (= 9*10^9/(300*10^9)) of the valuation you mention above.

Ideally, the largest funders, mainly Coefficient Giving (CG) and GiveWell, would have moved money from the years with the lowest marginal cost-effectiveness to the ones with the highest until there were no significant changes in marginal cost-effectiveness across time. I can see their predictions about the funding from Anthropic's employees not having been accurate. However, it would be a bit surprising if they were completely off to the point of marginal cost-effectiveness significantly decreasing from 2025 to 2026.

On the margin I’d expect more AI safety donations, from them. But any guess to how much the cost effectiveness may change for health & biosecurity areas? 

I’d initially think there is a lot of room to absorb more funding with…

-Malaria vaccines

-Near HIV vaccine

-Chronic diseases (https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death)

-Sentinel / biosecurity global disease monitoring system

-Advanced Market Commitments for various vaccines & tests (https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/10-technologies-that-wont-exist-in-5-yrs/)

Also promotion of more free trade always got a much higher cost effectiveness score than even any health intervention in the Copenhagen Consensus estimates. Maybe with building negative sentiments around tariffs EA could start pushing for more trade agreements with lower income countries. (https://copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus)