Cari Tuna’s Coefficient Giving is offering free, research-backed guidance to major donors—pioneering a smarter, more rigorous era in global philanthropy where impact and evidence trump personal passion.
A New Model for Billionaire Giving Emerges
In a move poised to reverberate across the philanthropic world, Cari Tuna—San Francisco-based billionaire and cofounder of Open Philanthropy—has announced a groundbreaking shift: the launch of Coefficient Giving, a resource dedicated to providing free, research-driven guidance to major donors seeking to maximize their charitable impact.
Tuna’s approach stands out in a landscape often dominated by personal passions and intuition. Instead, she is advocating for an evidence-based, analytical model that prioritizes maximizing social good over legacy building or feel-good giving. This announcement formalizes and expands advising work that her organization, previously known as Open Philanthropy, has conducted for select donors in recent years, with outside givers already channeling over $300 million into high-impact causes identified by Tuna’s team.
The Driving Force: Evidence Over Emotion
The impetus for this new era of philanthropy began in 2010 when Cari Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz—a cofounder of Facebook—decided to dedicate the majority of their wealth, totaling billions, to improving the world. Dissatisfied with the status quo and the “follow your heart” advice prevalent in philanthropic circles, Tuna conducted rigorous research to discover how donors could do the most good for the greatest number of people—a philosophy aligned with the effective altruism movement [AP News].
Open Philanthropy, now Coefficient Giving, has since directed over $4 billion to areas including global health, animal welfare, and AI safety. Tuna emphasizes that while passion is valid, failing to ground philanthropy in research overlooks “the biggest opportunities to help others, especially the most disadvantaged people.”
Philanthropy Meets Systems Thinking: Open Phil’s Expansion
Under the new banner of Coefficient Giving, the organization is expanding its remit from advising only the Moskovitz-Tuna family to helping other major donors. The focus is on high-net-worth individuals willing to fund initiatives where dollars can yield particularly large benefits, often in less conventional or complex fields.
There’s no rigid minimum for what constitutes a “major donor,” but the service’s sweet spot is philanthropists aiming to deploy significant resources with strategic leverage—especially those not building giant foundations of their own. As CEO Alexander Berger notes, Coefficient Giving distinguishes itself from typical philanthropic consultants by offering a deeply opinionated, research-heavy perspective on where funds can achieve the most tangible global change.
Effective Altruism and the Power of Cause Selection
Open Philanthropy’s pioneering framework—prioritizing causes that are important, neglected, and tractable—now sits at the heart of Coefficient Giving’s strategy. The effective altruism movement, rooted in utilitarian philosophy and popular among Silicon Valley thinkers, underpins much of this methodology. Its adherents systematically analyze where money can most powerfully improve or save lives [AP News].
- Global health, exemplified by malaria prevention, is often prioritized over local causes with smaller scale impact.
- Areas such as climate change or social justice, while important to many, have frequently taken a back seat in favor of causes offering more quantifiable returns per dollar.
- Tuna acknowledges that most of their partners are not from the effective altruism community, but all are asked to confront the fundamental question: “How can we have an outsized impact with our giving?”
This commitment to strategic cause selection reflects a seismic shift in billionaire giving—from celebrating individual passion projects to revolutionizing how large-scale donations are conceptualized and deployed.
AI Safety and Future Risks: Betting Big on the Long View
A remarkable facet of Open Philanthropy’s legacy—and Coefficient Giving’s future—is its early and substantial investment in AI safety and existential risk assessment. Well before widespread concern about runaway artificial intelligence emerged, Open Philanthropy committed over $580 million to building the field of AI risk mitigation, becoming one of the earliest institutional backers of organizations such as OpenAI.
Their approach targets catastrophic risks: everything from pandemics and nuclear war to the threat of advanced AI technology being used to design novel pathogens. Tuna and Berger believe that philanthropy’s comparative advantage lies in getting ahead of such risks—funding research and policy responses that governments and markets are too slow or risk-averse to support [Open Philanthropy].
- Open Philanthropy’s $30 million grant to OpenAI in 2017 helped catalyze global awareness of AI safety issues.
- Berger credits AI grantees with helping shape policy responses that might otherwise have lagged far behind technological advances.
- While issues such as bias and workforce disruption in AI are acknowledged, the core focus remains on broad, potentially existential impacts—a perspective that’s influencing funding strategies worldwide.
Redefining Philanthropy for a New Generation of Donors
By transforming Open Philanthropy into Coefficient Giving and offering free, in-depth advice to fellow donors, Cari Tuna is challenging traditional philanthropy’s culture. Her message: major giving should not be a byproduct of personal interest but a product of systematic, comparative analysis focused on saving and improving the greatest number of lives.
If this approach continues to gain traction among elite philanthropists, the ripple effects will be seen in everything from global health breakthroughs to the development of AI and tackling emerging existential risks.
For the next wave of wealth holders, the launch of Coefficient Giving signals that big-impact giving is no longer exclusively about “giving back”—it’s about giving better.
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