(Just got around to reading this. As a point of reference, it seems that at least Open Phil seems to have decided that tax-deductability is not more important than being able to give to things freely, which is why the Open Philanthropy Project is an LLC. I think this is at least slight evidence towards that tradeoff being worth it.)
There’s an enormous difference between having millions of dollars of operating expenditures in an LLC (so that an org is legally allowed to do things like investigate non-deductible activities like investment or politics), and giving up the ability to make billions of dollars of tax-deductible donations. Open Philanthropy being an LLC (so that its own expenses aren’t tax-deductible, but it has LLC freedom) doesn’t stop Good Ventures from making all relevant donations tax-deductible, and indeed the overwhelming majority of grants on its grants page are deductible.
Yep, sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that all of Open Phil’s funding is non-deductible, just that they decided that it was likely enough that they would find non-deductible opportunities that they went through the effort of restructuring their org to do so (and also gave up a bunch of other benefits like the ability to sponsor visas efficiently). My comment wasn’t very clear on that.
Here’s Open Phil’s blog post on why they decided to operate as an LLC. After reading it, I think their reasons are not very relevant to funding AI alignment research. (Mainly they want the freedom to recommend donations to non-501(c)(3) organizations like political groups.)
(Just got around to reading this. As a point of reference, it seems that at least Open Phil seems to have decided that tax-deductability is not more important than being able to give to things freely, which is why the Open Philanthropy Project is an LLC. I think this is at least slight evidence towards that tradeoff being worth it.)
There’s an enormous difference between having millions of dollars of operating expenditures in an LLC (so that an org is legally allowed to do things like investigate non-deductible activities like investment or politics), and giving up the ability to make billions of dollars of tax-deductible donations. Open Philanthropy being an LLC (so that its own expenses aren’t tax-deductible, but it has LLC freedom) doesn’t stop Good Ventures from making all relevant donations tax-deductible, and indeed the overwhelming majority of grants on its grants page are deductible.
Yep, sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that all of Open Phil’s funding is non-deductible, just that they decided that it was likely enough that they would find non-deductible opportunities that they went through the effort of restructuring their org to do so (and also gave up a bunch of other benefits like the ability to sponsor visas efficiently). My comment wasn’t very clear on that.
Here’s Open Phil’s blog post on why they decided to operate as an LLC. After reading it, I think their reasons are not very relevant to funding AI alignment research. (Mainly they want the freedom to recommend donations to non-501(c)(3) organizations like political groups.)