Right now is a good time to give because soon Anthropic will IPO. When it does, there will be an incredible influx of philanthropic funding—and this influx will pick the low-hanging donation fruit. The places where you can donate will be a lot less impactful after the IPO. For this reason, if you have a lot of savings but aren’t yet sure when to give, I would recommend giving now rather than, say, a year from now.
Here are some places I recommend:
If you’re giving to global health, I recommend giving to a
GiveWell top charity. They can’t really be beat—GiveWell very thoroughly investigates the best charities and gives to them.If you want to give generally to help animals, I recommend
Farmkind’stop charities. They support donations to the charities that Animal Charity Evaluators found to be the most effective.There’s a donation matching program which
lasts until October 31forLegal Impact For Chickens. Legal Impact For Chickens works on litigation to improve conditions for chickens. They’re a topAnimal Charity Evaluators recommended charity. An important part of improving conditions for chicken is enforcing the law, so this is a great opportunity to donate.If you’re specifically interested in helping invertebrates, I recommend either the
Arthropoda Foundation, which produces incredibly important research on insects, or Fairer Fields,which researches humane pesticides for insects.Humane pesticides are vitally importantgiven that every day about 1000x more insects are harmed by pesticides than people have ever lived. Also, as always, theShrimp Welfare Projectis hard to beat.If you’re concerned about digital mind welfare, I recommend
giving to Eleoswhich is just about the only game in town. They carry out research relevant to AI welfare and are doing important work to build the field. Given the field’s nascency and importance,given that approximately 100% of futuresentient beings in expectation will be digital, Eleos is pretty great.If you want to give politically to impactful candidates, I recommend
Many Rutinelwho, my sense is, is very good on the most important issues like AI. While he’s a clear favorite, odds are still about 15% that he loses. If you care more about general Democratic victories, thenOathvoteis a good resource. Political donations are good because legal campaign spending limits make them hard to saturate.If you want to give to AI safety and general existential risk reduction—so that your money will be thrown in a pot that smart people will spend trying to avert extinction from biological weapons and AI—I recommend
Longviewand theSurvival and Flourishing Fund.If you think EA is good, then I recommend donations to the
EA infrastructure fund,Giving What We Can,Effektiv spenden,the CEA community builders program, and regional EA programs likeEA Netherlands.
My guess is that at this point, the three best places to donate are to help neglected potentially sentient beings like digital and arthropod welfare, growing EA, and political donations, with political donations probably being best.
