The Third Wave of American Philanthropy

OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic co-founders, and employee equity will unlock enormous philanthropic capital going forward, with conservative estimates around $37 billion per year in additional giving and optimistic estimates approaching $100 billion per year. This is a very large shift even compared to the current scale of annual U.S. philanthropic giving, roughly $600 billion.

The problem is not the total amount of money but the shortage of organizations and talent to absorb it. The author argues that this money will flow toward new agendas such as safety in the AI transition, biosecurity, and human flourishing, and that there are still far too few tech-caliber organizations capable of quickly solving these challenges.

Handling this will require a large number of 'philanthropic startups' and founder-level talent to run them. As an example, the author calculates that hundreds or thousands more organizations at the level of the Institute for Progress or Arc Institute may be needed, arriving at the conclusion that essentially Alphabet- or Meta-scale talent must be newly built within the philanthropic ecosystem.

Large numbers of so-called philanthropic VCs, who would serve as capital allocators, will also be needed at scale. This could require executing around 50,000 grants per year and an operating staff numbering in the thousands, and the author emphasizes that especially in cases like OpenAI Foundation, where a single foundation must disburse around $22 billion per year, more sophisticated operating systems and distribution strategies are essential.