It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic’s founders to make their pledges legally binding.
Anthropic’s founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.
As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It’s hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.
Quickly: 1. I think there’s probably good work to be done here! 2. I think the link you meant to include was https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/organizations/funders/giving-pledge/ 3. To be clear, I’m not directly writing this wiki. I’m using Claude Code with a bunch of scripts and stuff to put it together. So I definitely recommend being a bit paranoid when it comes to specifics!
That said, I think normally it does a decent job (and I’m looking to improve it!). On the 36%, that seems to have come from this article, which has a bit more, which basically reaffirms the point. https://ips-dc.org/report-giving-pledge-at-15/
We calculate pledge fulfillment for deceased Pledgers as the amount of a Pledger’s charitable giving (either during their lifetime or through bequests from their estate) divided by the sum of their final net worth plus their charitable giving.
22 U.S. Pledgers have died, including 14 of the original 2010 signers. These 22 people were worth a combined $43.4 billion when they died.
Only one of the 22 deceased Pledgers — Chuck Feeney — gave his entire $8 billion fortune away before he died.
8 of the 22 deceased Pledgers fulfilled their pledges, giving away 50 percent or more of their wealth at death, either while they were living or in their estates.
The remaining 13 deceased Pledgers gave away less than 50 percent of their wealth, either while they were living or in their estates — although some of their estates are still being resolved.
I’m going to guess the total donated will be 30% of this by EA funders, and a low percentage by the rest. I think your conservative number is WAY too low based on previous pledge fulfillment rates. I get that it’s just a claude generation though
But that’s still 2 billion dollars at least, so I’ve updated positively on the amount of money that might go to good causes. Thanks for this @Ozzie Gooen strong upvote.
It would probably be worthwhile to encourage legally binding versions of the Giving Pledge in general.
Donations before death are optimal, but it’s particularly easy to ensure that the pledge is met at that stage with a will which can be updated at the time of signing it. (I presume most of the 64% did have a will, but chose to leave their fortune to others. I guess it’s possible some fortunes inherited by widow[er]s will be donated to pledged causes in the fullness of time).
I don’t think this should replace the Giving Pledge; some people’s intentions and financial situations are too complex to write into a binding contract, but such pledges should be taken more seriously (even though in practice they are still likely to be reversible).
It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic’s founders to make their pledges legally binding.
Anthropic’s founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.
As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It’s hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.
Quickly:
1. I think there’s probably good work to be done here!
2. I think the link you meant to include was https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/organizations/funders/giving-pledge/
3. To be clear, I’m not directly writing this wiki. I’m using Claude Code with a bunch of scripts and stuff to put it together. So I definitely recommend being a bit paranoid when it comes to specifics!
That said, I think normally it does a decent job (and I’m looking to improve it!). On the 36%, that seems to have come from this article, which has a bit more, which basically reaffirms the point.
https://ips-dc.org/report-giving-pledge-at-15/
Also, to give Anthropic credit, I want to flag that a bunch of the employee donations are legally binding. Anthropic had a matching program which led to a good amount of money in Donor Advised Funds. https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/organizations/funders/anthropic-investors/ (Note that this is also LLM-generated, so meant as a rough guess)
I’m going to guess the total donated will be 30% of this by EA funders, and a low percentage by the rest. I think your conservative number is WAY too low based on previous pledge fulfillment rates. I get that it’s just a claude generation though
But that’s still 2 billion dollars at least, so I’ve updated positively on the amount of money that might go to good causes. Thanks for this @Ozzie Gooen strong upvote.
Thanks, fixed the link
It would probably be worthwhile to encourage legally binding versions of the Giving Pledge in general.
Donations before death are optimal, but it’s particularly easy to ensure that the pledge is met at that stage with a will which can be updated at the time of signing it. (I presume most of the 64% did have a will, but chose to leave their fortune to others. I guess it’s possible some fortunes inherited by widow[er]s will be donated to pledged causes in the fullness of time).
I don’t think this should replace the Giving Pledge; some people’s intentions and financial situations are too complex to write into a binding contract, but such pledges should be taken more seriously (even though in practice they are still likely to be reversible).
I had my Claude system do some brainstorming work on this.
https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/models/intervention-models/anthropic-pledge-enforcement/
It generated some more specific interventions here.