Episode Details
Back to Episodes“CCF: Billions are coming. Still no plan to give well?” by Rethink Priorities, Marcus_A_Davis
Description
TLDR: Everyone's talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team at Rethink Priorities.
Amid all the discussion of the coming wave of AI-driven philanthropy, one question gets surprisingly little attention: how should this money be allocated across causes, and on what basis?
The stakes are large. One back-of-the-envelope calculation estimated that yearly philanthropic spending could increase by 37 billion dollars to 100 billion dollars, a 6–17% jump. About two-fifths of that (15 to 40 billion dollars) will likely come from Anthropic founders and employees, most of whom are likely to give in a way influenced by effective altruism, trying to maximize impact per dollar. (The remaining three-fifths might come from the OpenAI Foundation.) That is fifteen to forty times the 1 billion dollars moved by effective giving organizations in 2024, every year.
A number of [...]
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Outline:
(00:14) TLDR: Everyone's talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
(02:53) Will there be enough opportunities to fund? Spoiler: Yes.
(04:30) Determining if there's something left worth funding depends on thinking about tradeoffs
(06:43) "Effectiveness" isn't an on/off switch
(07:56) Making tradeoffs between apples and oranges
(10:35) Think you already know how to distribute effectively? What's your actual plan?
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First published:
September 25th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.