Good question, it’s a good idea to think about this in advance.
Some thoughts:
It’s pretty unlikely that Anthropic goes public at a time that matters. Much more likely is that either AGI happens and everyone dies; or AGI happens and the economy is radically transformed to the point that things like “going public” don’t make sense anymore; or AI progress fizzles and Anthropic can’t support the growth that investors expect, and it shuts down or radically contracts.
A more likely scenario is that Anthropic has a tender offer where early employees can sell a lot of equity.
But tender offers are still limited in scope. Plus, the people with the most equity—founders/execs—often don’t sell much equity because they want to signal confidence to investors. If you multiply the discounts due to (1) tender offer will have a cap on sales, (2) biggest equity holders probably won’t sell much, (3) sellers will only donate some fraction of their equity, I would be surprised if a tender offer resulted in more than $1 billion for EA causes—which is great, but wouldn’t change the ecosystem the way FTX did. On the other hand, Anthropic donors might want to spend down very quickly due to short timelines. $1 billion spent over two years would definitely change the funding ecosystem.
There a high chance that we won’t figure out how to align AI and it will kill everyone, and the best move is a global ban on ASI. People at Anthropic will disproportionately disagree with me about this, because (1) people who believe that will mostly not go to work at an AI company, and (2) among those who do believe that, many will be influenced by their colleagues to change their minds. So I don’t expect to see much increase in funding for the interventions that look best by my lights.
Good question, it’s a good idea to think about this in advance.
Some thoughts:
It’s pretty unlikely that Anthropic goes public at a time that matters. Much more likely is that either AGI happens and everyone dies; or AGI happens and the economy is radically transformed to the point that things like “going public” don’t make sense anymore; or AI progress fizzles and Anthropic can’t support the growth that investors expect, and it shuts down or radically contracts.
A more likely scenario is that Anthropic has a tender offer where early employees can sell a lot of equity.
But tender offers are still limited in scope. Plus, the people with the most equity—founders/execs—often don’t sell much equity because they want to signal confidence to investors. If you multiply the discounts due to (1) tender offer will have a cap on sales, (2) biggest equity holders probably won’t sell much, (3) sellers will only donate some fraction of their equity, I would be surprised if a tender offer resulted in more than $1 billion for EA causes—which is great, but wouldn’t change the ecosystem the way FTX did. On the other hand, Anthropic donors might want to spend down very quickly due to short timelines. $1 billion spent over two years would definitely change the funding ecosystem.
There a high chance that we won’t figure out how to align AI and it will kill everyone, and the best move is a global ban on ASI. People at Anthropic will disproportionately disagree with me about this, because (1) people who believe that will mostly not go to work at an AI company, and (2) among those who do believe that, many will be influenced by their colleagues to change their minds. So I don’t expect to see much increase in funding for the interventions that look best by my lights.