The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff
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The third wave of American philanthropy<br>AI is about to generate hundreds of billions in new philanthropic funding. We have a huge amount of work to do to make the most of it.
Nan Ransohoff<br>May 19, 2026
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Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.<br>How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today?<br>I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it.<br>This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it.<br>How much money is that, and is it meaningful?
AI will likely add ~$37–100B per year in intended philanthropic spend in the near future
Some directional napkin math suggests that adding up philanthropic pools from just three sources – (1) the OpenAI Foundation, (2) Anthropic founders, and (3) Anthropic employees – translates to an additional ~$37B of intended annual spend:<br>~$370B in total philanthropic assets using today’s OAI and Anthropic valuations:<br>OpenAI Foundation: Current valuation of $850B * 26% = ~$220B total.
Anthropic founders: 7 co-founders have a combined ~12-18% of the company, and have pledged 80% of their wealth. So $900B current valuation * 13% * 80% = ~$90B total.
Anthropic employees: Anthropic has an aggressive philanthropic matching program. This source estimates $20-$40B in employee DAFs based on a $350B valuation, which has since increased to $900B. Let’s be conservative and call it ~$60B total.
Let’s imagine everyone would like to spend ~10% per year, assuming they can find great things to spend it on. So, $370B * 10%= $37B per year.<br>Why 10%? Foundations payout on average 5-9% per year. DAFs payout on average 20-25% per year. So, 10% is pretty conservative by these numbers.
Of course, this could be lower than expected: OpenAI and Anthropic could stumble (a la FTX). IPO timelines could slip. Funders could decide to spend far more conservatively than anticipated.<br>But it could also be much higher. This $37B per year figure is based on today’s valuation of OAI/Anthropic and a pretty modest 10% per year spend target. Let’s say that OpenAI and Anthropic valuations double in a handful of years (doesn’t seem crazy given their trajectories), and maybe these donors want to increase their target annual spend from 10% to 15% because they’re especially worried about the AI transition. This brings us closer to ~$100B per year in target annual spend (note: I’m using the words target annual spend because there are many reasons why actual annual spend could be meaningfully lower than this – we’ll discuss those later in the piece).<br>US charitable giving is around $600B per year. Putting this all together: $37B – $100B of new philanthropic funding, which would be a 6-17% increase in annual philanthropic spending relative to today’s $600B/year in the US.<br>Practically speaking, a philanthropic ecosystem that can already disburse $600B/year can likely absorb another $50B without much trouble. The real question is whether there are $50B worth of initiatives that are compelling to these funders. If not, the dollars won’t get spent.<br>The type of money (who it’s coming from and how they’ll likely want to spend it) makes this potentially very meaningful
Just to get a feel for how big $50B/year is, let’s look at a few organizations that are generally well-respected in these circles (even if they’re not a perfect match for all funders).<br>$50B/year could fully fund the annual budgets of the following organizations:<br>6 Gates Foundations (~$9B/yr), or
67 Coefficient Givings (~$1B/yr), or
100 GiveWells (~$500M/yr), or
333 Arc Institutes (~$150M/yr), or
5000 Institutes for Progress (~$10M/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 the money that’s coming.<br>So, what types of organizations are needed?<br>One important input in answering this question is to understand the worldview of this wave of funders, as it informs the types of solutions they’ll be excited to fund. I’ll do my best to sketch out a few core beliefs of this wave, but it will inevitably be imperfect – both because there’s variation between funders, and because this worldview will evolve...