Two Coefficient Givings beat one twice as big

LessWrong is hosting an argument that the philanthropic community should use the expected AI windfall—potentially thirty-seven billion dollars or more—to build new grantmakers rather than just scale up the ones that already exist. Per the essay, organizations like Coefficient Giving and GiveWell have become so dominant that they create real risks: grantees depend too heavily on their decisions, organizational blind spots become ecosystem failure points, and their size leaves them poorly suited to handling both seed-stage and massive grants. The author compares this to economic monopsony—one dominant buyer shaping what gets produced in the first place. With tens of billions in potential new funding, building multiple independent grantmakers at medium scale could hedge against these risks more effectively than making existing giants even bigger.

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