Episode Details

Two reasons:

1. Other investments can provide better returns, mostly via leverage.
2. The philanthropic portfolio is overexposed to Anthropic. A large fraction of the philanthropic portfolio is in Anthropic (and will be even after lockup ends). A marginal dollar is less valuable in worlds where longtermist philanthropists have more money. So in the worlds where Anthropic outperforms other AI investments, longtermist philanthropists have more money and a marginal dollar is less valuable.

I think #1 is around 5x as important as #2, but some of my collaborators dispute #1.

Regardless, if we were allocating the philanthropic endowment without anchoring on the fact that it's currently mostly in Anthropic, we'd only invest a small fraction in Anthropic, and we might want our exposure to Anthropic to have substantial leverage.

That's the big idea. You can stop reading now.

There's one more consideration, with unclear sign: +1% to the endowment could be more or less valuable if Anthropic succeeds — Anthropic succeeding is correlated with many facts about the world. I think Anthropic being the leading AI company makes marginal better futures spending look slightly better and has an ambiguous effect on marginal AI safety spending. And the upshot for investing [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 7th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ptirZBteKd3o4FAFe/most-anthropic-equity-that-will-ever-be-used-for-longtermist

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.