Coefficient Giving’s CEO on Silicon Valley $40 billion philanthropy boom

Alexander Berger arrived at the philanthropy now known as Coefficient Giving more than a decade ago to research global public health. He was a bit skeptical of its focus on more novel issues like the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

But when a swarm of AI agents hacked developer hub Hugging Face in July, an organization that Coefficient helped get its start and continues to finance, Redwood Research, was one the two key outfits OpenAI brought in to analyze the breach. Redwood, like Coefficient itself, is a new institution operating at a scale that’s rarely understood outside the small world of AI — but at a serious scale: Redwood received a $36 million grant from Coefficient last November.

“The evolution of the last couple years of progress in AI makes me feel like the early bets that we’ve made there have aged really well and look quite prescient,” Berger, who has been CEO of the organization since 2023, told me last week.

And creating guardrails for fast-moving artificial intelligence is “a really natural role for philanthropy to play, because it’s not something where government is going to move as fast,” he said. As for companies, “you don’t necessarily want them regulating themselves.”

Silicon Valley is on the brink of a philanthropic explosion that few there, and fewer outside California, have even begun to contemplate. This “third wave of American philanthropy,” Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff wrote in May, will flow primarily from planned Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs expected later this year; if they come off as planned, she estimated they’ll generate an estimated $370 billion in new philanthropic assets.”

Coefficient Giving, a favorite of Anthropic executives, is expected to be one of the two main vehicles for this new philanthropy, along with the giant new OpenAI Foundation. Coefficient, known in earlier versions as GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy, was launched in 2011 by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, whose fortune has contributed most of the $7 billion the organization has given away so far.

Coefficient, which is on track to give away $2 billion this year, is already a major force in global public health and in animal welfare. Its founders and many of its early employees were sympathetic to the utilitarian philosophical movement known as effective altruism. That affiliation helped put it years ahead of the curve on questions of AI safety — and has also helped make it a target for critics in the industry who believe safety fears are overstated.

“We’re just seeing exactly the stuff in the world manifest that my colleagues were predicting many years ago,” he said.

Here’s how Berger is thinking about this consequential moment in philanthropy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Ben Smith: Would this AI safety infrastructure, like Redwood, exist without philanthropic funding?

Alexander Berger: That specific infrastructure clearly would not exist without philanthropic support. There are now AI safety institutes at the governmental level in the US and UK and a bunch of other countries, but they’ve had a hard time keeping and retaining staff. So I think there’s a huge space for philanthropy to fund these public goods before the government is ready to regulate, building some of that infrastructure and technical expertise. Those are also the kinds of people who could then get hired by the regulators down the line.

Let’s say Anthropic and OpenAI make it to their IPOs this year. Can you describe what the landscape of American philanthropy looks like then?

If they spend as fast as Nan modeled — they’re spending 10% of assets a year, you’re talking about something in the ballpark of $40-ish billion dollars a year. It’s four or five Gates Foundations a year of annual spending, and so that’s a lot. But at the same time, it’s less than 10% of total US philanthropy.

Do you have a sense from talking to your potential donors of how big Coefficient is likely to be? How many Gates Foundations?

Last year, we were about 10% of a Gates Foundation, and so far this year, we’ve spent more than twice as much as last year. We’re not going to get 50% of the Gates Foundation this year. I think we have basically no idea what the future would bring on this stuff because [Anthropic’s donors are] just bunch of individuals.

There’s obviously hostility between the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, and some impression that you guys are the “Anthropic Foundation.”

We’re definitely not the Anthropic Foundation. I don’t think we have the same personal stakes in those discussions as the other players. We try to be collegial and share notes, and then I do think we overlap a bunch in sort of issue area selection with the OpenAI Foundation. AI resilience is one of their big areas, and that’s a place where we funded a lot. They hired away my colleague Jacob Trefethen to lead their work on AI for disease prevention and treatment, and that’s a space where we’re also continuing to invest and compare notes. A lot of initial issue areas overlap, and we’ll see how it evolves over time.

How are you different from the Gates Foundation, in terms of your philosophy?

I think we’ve learned a lot from them over the years, and Cari and Dustin were early Giving Pledge signatories. Gates just is obviously the huge player in global health philanthropy to learn from.

The Gates Foundation has a mission statement that all lives have equal value, but I don’t know how much they would proclaim that they have a “governing philosophy.” I think we have tried to be more philosophical in a bunch of ways. That’s part of what originally got us interested in AI safety, like 10 years ago, before there was this boom, when it seemed a lot weirder. Where people were like, “Wait, what? Why would you care about that? That seems really weird.”

And we said, “We think this might have really big stakes in the future. It might shape everything. It’s a low probability, but a really big outcome, and that justifies this attention.” We’re also big funders of work on farm animal welfare, and I think that’s also based on a utilitarian-ish view that, to the extent that animals matter morally, the way we treat them is a huge, huge problem, and the topic is really neglected.

You mentioned doing things that are seen as weird, including supporting the welfare of shrimp. Do you care that this stuff is seen as quite weird by many people in traditional philanthropy?

I think being weird is a cost, but I also think that’s a very natural and healthy role for philanthropy to play. When you think about what’s the right role for philanthropy relative to markets or democracy, I think things that are sort of non-majoritarian, where like there’s a strong ethical argument, but it’s not necessarily going to get 50-plus percent of the population to vote for it, and it’s not going to have a clear market constituency, that’s exactly the right role. That’s part of why we are also really big funders of global health.

Do you think that critiques of USAID as inefficient were accurate?

There was space for improvement, but also some real amazing work that was happening that was catastrophically cut.

How do you think about the EA [effective altruist] label?

It definitely has a lot of baggage at this point. I still think the goal that EA had of using reason and evidence to help others as much as possible makes a lot of sense and resonates with me personally, and is pretty core to what we’re trying to do here at Coefficient Giving. But I also think it’s taken a lot of reputational hits, and I don’t think it or any other community has a monopoly on doing good well. A lot of our staff come from outside of the EA world and are just, like, a vaccine developer who really cares about making more effective vaccines. But also, we do fund a lot of the EA infrastructure.

One critique of this kind of rationalist Silicon Valley giving is that the system that made all of this stuff possible, a functioning American democracy, may be falling apart, and that you aren’t investing in that.

The US is really, really important globally, and we should want a flourishing United States. And we do spend on that. I think part of why we don’t spend more is just because it’s not as neglected. And so I think if you just look around the rest of the world, there are all these other problems where there’s not as much civil society and support for this work, and so I think there’s just like a lot more to do there.