Err towards applying for funding from an appropriate fund.
FWIW, I think this approach limits downside risk, as you outline, but really caps upside potential for EA. The existing funds are highly correlated with each other in values / perspectives on certain issues (e.g. I think it is quite bad that there isn’t an animal welfare-focused fund that is skeptical of the value of marginal dollars spent on farmed animal welfare, which I think is a reasonable position, and all of the AI funds seem to coordinate quite heavily). There just aren’t that many funds, they aren’t that diverse in viewpoint, and donations primarily going via funds concentrates power in EA in the hands of a few dozen people.
I think that I’d feel more excited about this approach if there were tons and tons of good funds with independent theses, but there aren’t. Maybe that means it is time for lots of people to start new funds. But by default, I expect everything going through funds to mean way less grift, yes, but also way less experimentation, less risk taking, and less divergence from consensus views.
FTX Future Fund, for all its issues / impacts on community dynamics, spurred a massive change in what people thought was on the table. The regrantor program in particular seemed like a genuinely massive improvement in democratizing EA, which, in my view, makes EA better and lets people do high risk/reward bets. There are downsides to that, including grift. But the push for funds, especially in animal welfare, seems like a fairly large mistake to me, and I think the end result will be a bunch of money wasted on marginal farmed animal interventions that Coefficient could have otherwise funded, or were obviously not worth funding.
I agree with the problems you outline in not going with the fund approach, but I don’t think the solutions being applied, especially on the fund side, are the right ones for doing the most good.
Very pro groups approaching fundraising with honesty and integrity though!
This seems overly negative on marginal FAW funding opportunities. I struggle to believe that a movement with only $250M/year will struggle to spend more money productively when climate mitigation spends $10B, global development spends $11B, AI safety is probably spending $500M+, etc. Also, funding in the FAW space myself, I think the marginal opportunities are far better than “obviously not worth funding”, and I still expect them to affect approx. several animals per dollar (for impact-minded donors like CG, EA AWF, etc). I’m curious what you have in mind though when you conceptualise the marginal FAW funding opportunity and why you’re so negative on them generally.
FWIW I am also very pro having more decentralised regrantors like FTX and would like to see some more experiments like that too! But having almost been a recipient of such a grant, my guess is that this also leads to a lot of wasted money.
For sure—I am quite negative on these marginal opportunities in FAW being good. To be clear, if there weren’t any funds primarily (or even partially) focused on farmed animal welfare, I’d make a bid for those to exist too rather than just funds for neglected animals / whatever it is I prefer (I’m not sure I even know). I think there shouldn’t just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I’m sure I’m wrong about many things. I also agree that there would probably be a lot of wasted money under this model, but just think the higher upside offsets it.
I’d be happy to chat about views on FAW work specifically, but probably won’t here in detail (just because they are complicated and messy and hard to get into without talking about specific groups). At a high-level, I think that diet change work is basically intractable (or where it is tractable it just risks increasing chicken farming), and the vast majority of the value from welfare work is coming from the first $20M-$40M spent on it, in a pretty predictable way, such that marginal dollars are hard to spend effectively, and beyond those there isn’t anything super scalable it seems like. I think the climate/global heath analogies aren’t quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn’t be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.
Seems like some of your concern is that a bunch more money should be spent on neglected species & wild animals but my sense is that EA AWF is explicitly prioritising this work? or do you think that it’s still not sufficient given the potential marginal opportunity vs farmed animal work?
I think there shouldn’t just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I’m sure I’m wrong about many things.
I generally agree with this but I guess I’m not sure that there is one dominant position on how to help animals in the EAA world? You might say CG directs a large portion of overall movement funds, therefore their position becomes the dominant position, but IMO The Navigation Fund has a relatively distinct view on how to best help animals, which is meaningful as they’re the second biggest funder in the movement. But yes, probably CG and EA AWF have relatively similar worldviews to one another.
I think the climate/global heath analogies aren’t quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn’t be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.
Yes this is true but GiveWell moved over $400M in grants in 2026, which makes me think there is at least $400M of highly cost-effective opportunities in global health & development, not counting the other hundreds of millions of other impact-focused global health focused funding from people like CG, Mulago, etc. FWIW even a very outdated RFMF page on GiveWell’s website from 2019 estimated their top charities had $70-600M+ in RFMF, so hard for me to imagine the FAW movement can only spend $20-40M well (of course, we are a relatively newer movement so we do have less scalable things to fund—I agree finding those should be a priority).
Basically, I just disagree that the FAW movement only has around $20-40M of good opportunities and additional funds aren’t that well utilised. A priori, that would just be extremely surprising to me, given:
We have some interventions that work relatively well (corporate campaigns) but there are still many important countries where we have <5FTE utilising this strategy
Factory farming is a global problem, so we need people in many different countries to figure out how to address it
We only have around 2,000 − 3,000 people working full-time on farm animal welfare globally. This seems ludicrously small given the scale of the opposition and there is lots of useful movement building that we probably should fund to attract more good people (basically copying what AI safety / EA has been doing wrt movement building).
The FAW movement has historically paid pretty low salaries, so there are some salary increases just to be on par with other NGOs/issues
Welfare technology seems to be a whole area that could use lots of funding in a productive way and we’ve barely explored it (e.g. starting companies or putting out prizes to develop better stunning technology, on-farm welfare monitoring tech, etc).
We have historically not invested much in political advocacy, and this seems both essential and tractable if done well. Our opponents are spending a bunch of money on this political work and slowing down / overturning promising reforms (e.g. EU animal welfare reforms) so spending additional money here is likely quite useful.
Also, I would be curious how much of AI safety funding you think is well-spent, similar to the $20-40M number you had in mind for FAW?
I think I feel less convinced than you that scaling most these are going to end up resulting in meaningful positive impact for more animals — the exception is welfare technology, which I’m quite excited about, but my impression is that the good opportunities here are pretty fundable right now.
To be clear, I also don’t think loads of money should go into neglected animals either (though on the margin I’m more excited about things here than FAW) — I think there is a lot more potential for helping animals in wild animal and invertebrate welfare, but there aren’t ways to absorb tons (e.g. tens of millions of dollars) of funding there either (at least not yet).
I generally in both cases am excited by a smaller, more highly coordinated and strategic movement (or set of movements) than a larger one, but I think more funding right now would be used primarily to try to make a bigger one. I’m guessing this is a lot of the crux between us. But, I also know that I’m a bit on my own island with these views at times, and am genuinely pro-pluralism in the space. So I appreciate you pushing on it so hard!
I think AI safety mostly can’t absorb new funding that effectively, except for political things (which maybe are complicated due to various backfire risks), but it also has a better track record so far than FAW which suggests it can use the money it has more effectively. But I’m not a partisan here really — at heart I’m an animal welfare person who mainly feels sad that it might be pretty hard to help more animals than we already are effectively.
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like it’s barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
Hi Abraham, I’m curious what you think about the difference between FTX and this situation is that FTX was disbursing hired grantmakers to do the work. My impression is that most Anthropic staff don’t have the time or expertise to set this up themselves, even if it was a model like a giving circle, nor do they want to.
It seems like a challenge here to recreate FTX’s level of willingness to fund ambitious projects is that for Anthropic donors, either they’d need to want to spend the time setting up foundations individually, or someone with the right expertise would need to set up their own fund and join the fray on more speculative work.
FWIW my vague impression (I have less visibility into other cause areas) is that as funds anticipate an influx of funding coming into the space, funding more ambitious and speculative bets seems to be a part of the conversation (while hopefully reducing the downsides that came with FTX funding).
Yeah, I agree with all those being challenges here—I think I was mainly responding to what I perceive to be a push (maybe explicitly in this case) to reduce the options presented to new funders to a few funds with fairly similar views, which I think is possibly a strategic mistake, even if the alternative isn’t ideal either.
FWIW, I think this approach limits downside risk, as you outline, but really caps upside potential for EA. The existing funds are highly correlated with each other in values / perspectives on certain issues (e.g. I think it is quite bad that there isn’t an animal welfare-focused fund that is skeptical of the value of marginal dollars spent on farmed animal welfare, which I think is a reasonable position, and all of the AI funds seem to coordinate quite heavily). There just aren’t that many funds, they aren’t that diverse in viewpoint, and donations primarily going via funds concentrates power in EA in the hands of a few dozen people.
I think that I’d feel more excited about this approach if there were tons and tons of good funds with independent theses, but there aren’t. Maybe that means it is time for lots of people to start new funds. But by default, I expect everything going through funds to mean way less grift, yes, but also way less experimentation, less risk taking, and less divergence from consensus views.
FTX Future Fund, for all its issues / impacts on community dynamics, spurred a massive change in what people thought was on the table. The regrantor program in particular seemed like a genuinely massive improvement in democratizing EA, which, in my view, makes EA better and lets people do high risk/reward bets. There are downsides to that, including grift. But the push for funds, especially in animal welfare, seems like a fairly large mistake to me, and I think the end result will be a bunch of money wasted on marginal farmed animal interventions that Coefficient could have otherwise funded, or were obviously not worth funding.
I agree with the problems you outline in not going with the fund approach, but I don’t think the solutions being applied, especially on the fund side, are the right ones for doing the most good.
Very pro groups approaching fundraising with honesty and integrity though!
This seems overly negative on marginal FAW funding opportunities. I struggle to believe that a movement with only $250M/year will struggle to spend more money productively when climate mitigation spends $10B, global development spends $11B, AI safety is probably spending $500M+, etc. Also, funding in the FAW space myself, I think the marginal opportunities are far better than “obviously not worth funding”, and I still expect them to affect approx. several animals per dollar (for impact-minded donors like CG, EA AWF, etc). I’m curious what you have in mind though when you conceptualise the marginal FAW funding opportunity and why you’re so negative on them generally.
FWIW I am also very pro having more decentralised regrantors like FTX and would like to see some more experiments like that too! But having almost been a recipient of such a grant, my guess is that this also leads to a lot of wasted money.
For sure—I am quite negative on these marginal opportunities in FAW being good. To be clear, if there weren’t any funds primarily (or even partially) focused on farmed animal welfare, I’d make a bid for those to exist too rather than just funds for neglected animals / whatever it is I prefer (I’m not sure I even know). I think there shouldn’t just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I’m sure I’m wrong about many things. I also agree that there would probably be a lot of wasted money under this model, but just think the higher upside offsets it.
I’d be happy to chat about views on FAW work specifically, but probably won’t here in detail (just because they are complicated and messy and hard to get into without talking about specific groups). At a high-level, I think that diet change work is basically intractable (or where it is tractable it just risks increasing chicken farming), and the vast majority of the value from welfare work is coming from the first $20M-$40M spent on it, in a pretty predictable way, such that marginal dollars are hard to spend effectively, and beyond those there isn’t anything super scalable it seems like. I think the climate/global heath analogies aren’t quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn’t be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.
Seems like some of your concern is that a bunch more money should be spent on neglected species & wild animals but my sense is that EA AWF is explicitly prioritising this work? or do you think that it’s still not sufficient given the potential marginal opportunity vs farmed animal work?
I generally agree with this but I guess I’m not sure that there is one dominant position on how to help animals in the EAA world? You might say CG directs a large portion of overall movement funds, therefore their position becomes the dominant position, but IMO The Navigation Fund has a relatively distinct view on how to best help animals, which is meaningful as they’re the second biggest funder in the movement. But yes, probably CG and EA AWF have relatively similar worldviews to one another.
Yes this is true but GiveWell moved over $400M in grants in 2026, which makes me think there is at least $400M of highly cost-effective opportunities in global health & development, not counting the other hundreds of millions of other impact-focused global health focused funding from people like CG, Mulago, etc. FWIW even a very outdated RFMF page on GiveWell’s website from 2019 estimated their top charities had $70-600M+ in RFMF, so hard for me to imagine the FAW movement can only spend $20-40M well (of course, we are a relatively newer movement so we do have less scalable things to fund—I agree finding those should be a priority).
Basically, I just disagree that the FAW movement only has around $20-40M of good opportunities and additional funds aren’t that well utilised. A priori, that would just be extremely surprising to me, given:
We have some interventions that work relatively well (corporate campaigns) but there are still many important countries where we have <5FTE utilising this strategy
Factory farming is a global problem, so we need people in many different countries to figure out how to address it
We only have around 2,000 − 3,000 people working full-time on farm animal welfare globally. This seems ludicrously small given the scale of the opposition and there is lots of useful movement building that we probably should fund to attract more good people (basically copying what AI safety / EA has been doing wrt movement building).
The FAW movement has historically paid pretty low salaries, so there are some salary increases just to be on par with other NGOs/issues
Welfare technology seems to be a whole area that could use lots of funding in a productive way and we’ve barely explored it (e.g. starting companies or putting out prizes to develop better stunning technology, on-farm welfare monitoring tech, etc).
We have historically not invested much in political advocacy, and this seems both essential and tractable if done well. Our opponents are spending a bunch of money on this political work and slowing down / overturning promising reforms (e.g. EU animal welfare reforms) so spending additional money here is likely quite useful.
Also, I would be curious how much of AI safety funding you think is well-spent, similar to the $20-40M number you had in mind for FAW?
I think I feel less convinced than you that scaling most these are going to end up resulting in meaningful positive impact for more animals — the exception is welfare technology, which I’m quite excited about, but my impression is that the good opportunities here are pretty fundable right now.
To be clear, I also don’t think loads of money should go into neglected animals either (though on the margin I’m more excited about things here than FAW) — I think there is a lot more potential for helping animals in wild animal and invertebrate welfare, but there aren’t ways to absorb tons (e.g. tens of millions of dollars) of funding there either (at least not yet).
I generally in both cases am excited by a smaller, more highly coordinated and strategic movement (or set of movements) than a larger one, but I think more funding right now would be used primarily to try to make a bigger one. I’m guessing this is a lot of the crux between us. But, I also know that I’m a bit on my own island with these views at times, and am genuinely pro-pluralism in the space. So I appreciate you pushing on it so hard!
I think AI safety mostly can’t absorb new funding that effectively, except for political things (which maybe are complicated due to various backfire risks), but it also has a better track record so far than FAW which suggests it can use the money it has more effectively. But I’m not a partisan here really — at heart I’m an animal welfare person who mainly feels sad that it might be pretty hard to help more animals than we already are effectively.
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like it’s barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
Hi Abraham, I’m curious what you think about the difference between FTX and this situation is that FTX was disbursing hired grantmakers to do the work. My impression is that most Anthropic staff don’t have the time or expertise to set this up themselves, even if it was a model like a giving circle, nor do they want to.
It seems like a challenge here to recreate FTX’s level of willingness to fund ambitious projects is that for Anthropic donors, either they’d need to want to spend the time setting up foundations individually, or someone with the right expertise would need to set up their own fund and join the fray on more speculative work.
FWIW my vague impression (I have less visibility into other cause areas) is that as funds anticipate an influx of funding coming into the space, funding more ambitious and speculative bets seems to be a part of the conversation (while hopefully reducing the downsides that came with FTX funding).
Yeah, I agree with all those being challenges here—I think I was mainly responding to what I perceive to be a push (maybe explicitly in this case) to reduce the options presented to new funders to a few funds with fairly similar views, which I think is possibly a strategic mistake, even if the alternative isn’t ideal either.