We Need Unhobbled Donors

Epistemic status: I work on AI safety communications, policy, and field-building. High confidence in the core claim that donors should be front-loading their giving. Lower confidence on magnitudes, recruitment strategies, and the activities of existing funders.TL;DR: A large wave of philanthropic capital will enter the field, but it will arrive slowly and unevenly. This means that the neglectedness and tractability of different interventions will dramatically change. The field sorely needs unhobbled donors who can give fast before the wave, and seed the neglected projects megafunders will not."A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week."- George S. PattonIndividual donors and small grantmakers need to radically rethink their priorities, deployment timelines, and risk tolerances.The world is finally waking up to the coming wave of philanthropic capital. Attention is rightfully shifting towards strategy and talent bottlenecks: what are the needed organizations and interventions, and who will make them happen.But the days of being constrained by capital aren’t over.We have no guarantee of how much money will get deployed, by when, or to what. Important, high-variance bets will likely remain unfunded. And capital is not flowing fast enough into the rapid grants needed to prepare.What this means is those willing to act today are incredibly leveraged. They can fund the projects that will become dramatically more neglected, and seed efforts that will be newly tractable at scale.This post lays out the need for unhobbled donors: the missing category of funders who are willing to deploy capital before the wave, support early-stage projects, take risky bets, and put their names behind public campaigns.LeverageDiscount RateThe discount rate on spending is extremely high. A dollar deployed in 2026 can get you things a dollar in 2028 cannot.Political windows are closing. The midterms end in a few months. The Trump administration is devel