Third Wave
philanthropy
Nanran’s idea came to her while she was brushing her teeth, which she later thought was probably where most bad ideas came from.
She spat, rinsed, and walked to her bed. On her phone, she opened the app and typed it out before she could talk herself into editing it.
hot take: someone with money should fund a nonprofit that teaches normal people how to use AI detectors. teachers, hiring managers, parents. not the tech, the basic literacy. like, here is a tool, here is how it works, here is when not to trust it. that’s it. that’s the post.
She read it back once, decided it was fine, and posted. The like count was at three when she set the phone face-down on the nightstand. Two of the three were bots, probably. The third was her aunt, who liked everything.
She fell asleep wondering whether she had enough clean work polos for the week.
The first call came in at 9:47, which Nanran knew because she was watching the clock and trying not to. Tuesdays at the store were slow until lunch, and the manager had a policy about phones at the register that he enforced selectively, depending on whether he liked you that week.
The number was a 415 area code. Nanran silenced it.
It rang again at 9:52. Then 10:03. Then 10:11, from a different number, this one with a 202 prefix that she vaguely associated with politics, which made her more sure it was spam.
By her ten-thirty break, she had six voicemails. She sat on the loading dock behind the store and listened to them while picking at a granola bar.
“Hi, Nanran, this is Devin calling from the OpenAI Foundation, we saw your post this morning about AI literacy infrastructure and I wanted to reach out about potentially supporting, uh, supporting your initiative, please call me back at—”
She skipped it.
“Nanran, hi, my name is Priya, I’m with a family office that’s been actively scouting for high-leverage interventions in the AI epistemics space, and your framing really resonated with—”
She skipped that one too.
“Hi, this is calling from Open Philanthropy, we’d love to chat about a potential, um, grant, our minimum is usually two hundred and fifty thousand but for early-stage—”
Nanran lowered the phone. A pigeon was eating a fry next to the dumpster. She watched it for a long moment, then put the phone in her apron pocket and went back inside, because her break was over and the manager was the kind of manager who would notice.
The calls kept coming. She stopped listening to the voicemails after lunch. By the end of her shift she had forty-one of them and her phone had given up trying to alphabetize the missed-call list.
The most charitable interpretation she could come up with on the drive home was that someone had stolen her number and given it out as a fake. The second most charitable was a scam she had never heard of, where instead of asking for money they pretended to offer it, and somewhere along the line there’d be a routing number she’d be asked to confirm.
She rehearsed what she would say if any of them called while she was driving. The phrase she settled on was please remove this number from your list, thank you. Polite, firm, no opening.
She turned onto her street and started practicing it under her breath.
There were people on her lawn.
Nanran stopped the car halfway up the driveway and counted. Six. Seven. A woman in a blazer was pacing near the mailbox. Two men in identical navy suits were standing on the porch with the body language of people who had been there a while and were trying not to look like they had been there a while. Someone had a laptop open on the hood of a black SUV.
She turned off the engine. She thought about driving away. She thought about calling the police. She thought about her aunt, who would have an opinion about all of this and would deliver it loudly.
She got out of the car.
They moved toward her at once, fast but not aggressive, with the alert eagerness of dogs at a shelter who had been waiting for the right person.
“Nanran, hi, I’m Devin, OpenAI Foundation, I left—”
“Anthropic philanthropic council, we’d love to—”
“Schmidt Sciences, ten minutes of your time—”
“I represent a family that’s interested in—”
“Open Phil, we spoke earlier, well, I spoke at your voicemail—”
She held up a hand. They stopped, all of them, instantly, which was the most unnerving thing that had happened all day.
Nanran looked at the woman in the blazer, who seemed slightly more in charge than the others, although she was not sure how she could tell.
“Okay,” Nanran said. She took a breath. “My rent is eighteen-fifty. If any of this is real, one of you give me eighteen-fifty for the month and we can talk about the rest.”
The suits looked at each other.
Then, in near-unison, in the precise coordinated motion of pallbearers or a string quartet, they reached into their jackets and pulled out their phones.
“What’s your Venmo?”