ICTworks

More new charitable wealth has been created in the last two years than the entire Gates Foundation endowment. Most of the international development sector is not organized to receive any of it.

That is a solvable problem, and some people have already solved parts of it.

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The Size of the Wave

Run the arithmetic as a thought experiment. What if the new AI philanthropic money was subject to the Internal Revenue Code’s 5% minimum distribution the way Ford or MacArthur is?

• The OpenAI Foundation holds a 26% stake in OpenAI Group PBC. At the $852 billion valuation OpenAI’s August tender offer set, that is about $220 billion. If they were subject to the five percent rule, that is $11 billion a year.
• Anthropic’s eight co-founders pledged 80% of their wealth in January. After the company raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, Forbes estimated each co-founder’s net worth at $16.6 billion. Eight of them, at 80%, are roughly $106 billion pledged. At five percent, that is $5.3 billion a year.
• The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation genuinely does owe 5%. Nvidia’s rise pushed its assets up 170% to $9.2 billion in 2024, which puts its annual obligation around $460 million.

Run at 5%, these three pools alone would move about $17 billion a year. That is $1.4 billion a month or $327 million a week.

For scale, the Gates Foundation board endorsed a $9 billion annual payout in January, the largest in its history. The AI pools would move over twice that, every year, without Bill Gates writing another check.

Neither OpenAI Foundation nor the Anthropic founders are compelled to hit 5%. The OpenAI Foundation currently plans at least $1 billion for 2026, a payout of 0.45%. The point of the exercise is the ceiling, and the ceiling is enormous.

Small Organizations Can Absorb This Money

The standing objection to getting this money to grassroots organizations is capacity. A $3 million NGO cannot swallow a $50 million grant, so money finds universities and hospital systems with grants offices and indirect cost rates. That objection is real for the biggest awards.

It is solved for everything below them, and the proof is a live application form.

Read the OpenAI Foundation’s 2026 People-First AI Fund eligibility criteria. Applicants need annual operating budgets between $500,000 and $10 million. Grants cap at 10% of the organization’s budget. The Fund refuses applications from university-affiliated institutes and think tanks. The 2026 round went further and opened to regranting organizations for the first time.

OpenAI Foundation designed a large-scale instrument that only small organizations can use.

They sized the check to what a small organization can digest, they made the money unrestricted, and they locked the usual suspects out. Nearly 3,000 organizations applied, and the $40.5 million first wave reached 208 community groups. $40.5 million against $11 billion.

Every one of the 2025 grantees is American, because the eligibility page requires applicants to be “located in, and primarily conducting work within, the 50 U.S. states” or Washington, DC. Yet, a $3 million health NGO in Kisumu can absorb $300,000 as easily as a $3 million health NGO in Cleveland. What it cannot do is satisfy a 501(c)(3) requirement written into an eligibility page.

The hard engineering problem, moving serious money to organizations with five staff, has a working solution that is shipping right now. What stands between that solution and Kisumu is a line of eligibility text and an equivalency determination process that US grantmakers have run for decades.

Two Signals Worth Watching

The first signal came on July 23, when Alexander Berger and Otis Reid at Coefficient Giving raised their 2026 allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations to $1 billion, up from the $175 million they had committed seven months earlier. The money buys seasonal malaria chemoprevention, bed nets, vitamin A supplementation, and vaccination incentives, overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Set that against their own record. Coefficient directed a little over $1 billion across every cause area in all of 2025, the largest year in its history. One line item in 2026 now matches an entire record year.

Their reason is the wave.

Berger and Reid write that their expectations shifted within months because the future funding they are counting on depends on “the valuations of some extremely volatile assets.” They lowered their global health funding bar from roughly 2,000x to 1,000x to spend faster, so that grantees can grow enough to absorb much higher amounts later. They describe it as a bet on laying the groundwork for other funders to pick up the baton.

A grantmaker with no AI equity is spending its largest year ever building the receiving end of a wave that has not arrived.

The second signal came on August 20, when the OpenAI Foundation opened hiring across programs and operations, telling applicants that “much of the organization still left to build.” It named four kinds of people it wants, two of them grantmakers who want to back important work before it is obvious, and operators who want to build an organization capable of working at unusual scale.

Those job descriptions are open now.

The people who fill them will write the eligibility rules for 2027 and 2028. A foundation that can commission organoid experiments at Arc Institute can certify a Nairobi regranter. Which of those it does depends on who gets hired in the next two quarters and what those hires believe about where good work happens.

The Usual Suspects Will Do Well

Some of this money will move exactly where you expect, and there is nothing wrong with that.

On April 8, Jacob Trefethen announced he is finalizing the Foundation’s largest health commitment: more than $100 million across six research institutions for Alzheimer’s. Arc Institute, the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, Mass General Brigham, EvE Bio, UCSF, and Harvard Medical School. Roughly $17 million each.

Those six can each field a $17 million award next week. They have IRBs, compliance staff, and people whose full-time job is turning a funder’s interest into a signed agreement. Nobody should apologize for funding protein design at the institution that invented it.

The question is what share of the wave those institutions take, and the historic answer is most of it.

The Council on Foundations and Candid found that 39% of global grant dollars went to non-U.S. recipients. Of the total intended for international causes, about 13% reached organizations implementing the grant in the country where they are locally registered. The other 26% moved through intermediaries based outside the United States.

Even Coefficient’s global health billion runs through four organizations registered in London, New York, and a Los Angeles suburb. One of them, New Incentives, also holds a Nigerian registration as the All Babies Are Equal Initiative. The money reaches Kisumu. Most of the grant agreements do not.

Apply even that 13% to $17 billion and locally registered organizations in the Global South see $2.2 billion a year. That alone would rebuild what national NGO budgets lost in 2025 several times over.

Are We Ready to Ask for Something Different?

Here is what worries me, and it has nothing to do with the AI companies.

Our sector has spent two decades building the machinery to move donor money through Northern intermediaries, and it is very good at it.

When $17 billion appears, that machinery will activate immediately. Consortium leads will assemble. Prime and sub structures will form. The proposals will be excellent, and they will look exactly like the proposals we wrote for the funder that stopped writing checks last year.

The AI funders are new. They have not yet learned our habits.

The OpenAI Foundation wrote a grant program that excludes think tanks, which no traditional donor would do. Coefficient publishes its reasoning and revises its allocations in public. These are people making it up as they go, which means they can still be persuaded.

So the real question for anyone reading this: what are we asking them for?

A larger share of the same pipe, or a different pipe? Ministries in Kigali and Nairobi could ask for direct eligibility. African regranters could ask to be measured against the criteria the Foundation already wrote. Anyone building Africa’s AI floor while borrowing its ceiling has a case to make while the rules are still being drafted.

The grantmakers who will decide are being interviewed this month. What are we telling them?