My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".
One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).
The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.
Hello! PSF staffer/author of the linked post here. To be explicit, the Anthropic donation is actually "no strings attached," or in non-profit parlance "unrestricted," but with a handshake agreement that they hope to improve security with this sponsorship. So the gift will enable us to do security work we've wanted to do and it is our intention to do that, but Anthropic didn't formally earmark the money, which gives us a great deal more flexibility plus a lower accounting burden, and I'm personally very grateful for that.
Of course you can. The vast majority of donations of this magnitude come with strings attached, be it how the money is spent, access to leadership/events, etc
It's super common with non-profits. Obviously they would prefer no strings attached but some light strings are usually not a problem for most non-profits.
And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.
For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.
The vast majority of donations to, say, universities are made with a specific purpose, and that happens with a lot of non-profits too. The recipient doesn't have to accept the donation, of course, but if they do they track exactly how it was spent.
My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".
One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).
The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.
Hello! PSF staffer/author of the linked post here. To be explicit, the Anthropic donation is actually "no strings attached," or in non-profit parlance "unrestricted," but with a handshake agreement that they hope to improve security with this sponsorship. So the gift will enable us to do security work we've wanted to do and it is our intention to do that, but Anthropic didn't formally earmark the money, which gives us a great deal more flexibility plus a lower accounting burden, and I'm personally very grateful for that.
Of course you can. The vast majority of donations of this magnitude come with strings attached, be it how the money is spent, access to leadership/events, etc
It's super common with non-profits. Obviously they would prefer no strings attached but some light strings are usually not a problem for most non-profits.
And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.
For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.
The vast majority of donations to, say, universities are made with a specific purpose, and that happens with a lot of non-profits too. The recipient doesn't have to accept the donation, of course, but if they do they track exactly how it was spent.
Yes, and at least the strings they attached are productive palatable unlike some other organizations: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
That link shows the significance of this Anthropic donation too:
> $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received.
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