How (not) to fundraise from Anthropic staff

Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse . Short version: for organisations aiming for a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to you. A likely way to blow it is to cold email them. Despite previous attempts to discourage it, this is still happening, and we need to do better on this as a community. Someone in a WhatsApp group recently asked for donation recommendations that they could pass to Anthropic employees. The subsequent exchanges reminded me of the episode in The Last of Us when the infected start pouring out of the ground. Every person in the chat started sending their own charity/fund/pet project (including me, in fairness) and the questioner was immediately overwhelmed. Disappointingly, many of the suggestions explicitly did not fit the brief from the person asking, and were fairly obvious attempts to crowbar pet projects into scope. As someone who has thought a lot about the Funding Anthropalypse (hat tip to Pablo Melchor for the name), I want to suggest a better way for projects to access some of the $37bn+ in donations that could be in play next year. In short - become ‘legibly excellent’ to Anthropic staff. I strongly discourage you from cold emailing them. Should I cold email people at Anthropic and OpenAI? Frontier lab employees have told me they are each fielding up to 20…