“Philanthropy Needs Ambitious Projects Immediately” by Bentham’s Bulldog

Crosspost. Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it. Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic's founders, and Anthropic employees. A fairly conservative estimate puts the amount of charitable spending this would open up at around 50 billion dollars per year. This is about 1/2000th the annual GDP of Earth. US charitable giving is about 600 billion dollars per year—so this will increase total US charitable giving by about 8%. Crucially, many of these donors are interested in sponsoring high-impact charitable projects. Ransohoff notes: 50 billion dollars/year could fully fund the annual budgets of the following organizations: 6 Gates Foundations (~9 billion dollars/yr), or 67 Coefficient Givings (~1 billion dollars/yr), or 100 GiveWells (~500 million dollars/yr), or 333 Arc Institutes (~150 million dollars/yr), or 5000 Institutes for Progress (~10 million dollars/yr) Obviously, there are many effective organizations beyond those listed here. But the takeaway is that we are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb [...] --- First published: June 2nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PjnRtq8intQdeeDfA/philanthropy-needs-ambitious-projects-immediately --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.