“Current views on large-scale longtermist philanthropy” by Zach Stein-Perlman

This post summarizes some of my views. It states uncertain things boldly in part to [surface disagreements / help readers point out things that seem wrong or missing]. Note that many things are uncertain and many claims are not justified here.

One tl;dr: money is great even on the margin, and it's crucial to invest extremely well rather than merely well.

In 2026, philanthropists will donate about 1.6 billion dollars to AI safety nonprofits (being slightly picky about what counts) (~1.2 billion dollars CG, ~400 million dollars other). This has recently been growing at about 1.6x per year; this growth rate may increase in the future, even before crunch time.[1]

How much money will ever be available for AI safety philanthropy? Present value >100 billion dollars (in the mean and median scenarios, but really the distribution matters).

• AI safety philanthropists have some 40 billion dollars outside of Anthropic equity
• Anthropic is currently worth 1.5 trillion dollars[2] and around 7%[3] of it will be donated to good AI safety stuff, so that's present value 100 billion dollars
• Some new people will become AI safety philanthropists in the future

Anthropic will go public around December 2026. It's not obvious when shareholders [...]

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Outline:

(02:40) Before the intelligence explosion

(03:31) During the intelligence explosion

(04:36) After the intelligence explosion

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 6th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qm7M943R9cgWNqdwP/current-views-on-large-scale-longtermist-philanthropy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.