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Philanthropy Council is a small ceremony. You assemble a council of 5 historical minds from a closed pool of 10 voice-tuned figures — Einstein, Gandhi, Diana, Mandela, Teresa, Curie, Kahlo, Lovelace, da Vinci, Aristotle — and they deliberate, one voice at a time, over how to allocate a $1,000 mock treasury across three public-goods institutions.

Each member is voiced by a hand-tuned prompt grounded in their writings, era, and characteristic concerns. The model is Anthropic Claude Haiku — fast enough to keep each donation under a minute, so the deliberation feels present rather than batched.

Why this exists

Most "AI DAOs" use generic AI personas. The Philanthropy Council names its agents, gives them voices with intellectual lineage, and asks them to argue trade-offs out loud. The cast becomes the institutional brand. Conviction voting applied to AI agents is a wedge that almost no one else explores.

It's also a personal experiment in what an AI-augmented public-goods foundation could look like — the architecture is real-money-disbursement-ready for a future V3, where the council's allocations would actually execute on-chain to recipient organizations.

How a donation works

  1. You pick 5 of the 10 council members (default: a fresh random draw on each visit).
  2. The slate of 3 institutions is drawn by category — 3 distinct categories chosen at random from the 6 in the pool (Knowledge & Open, Humanitarian, Civil rights & free press, Open Tech, Environment, Health Research), one institution from each. The full 35-pool is visible behind All candidates.
  3. The treasury splits equally among the 5 council members (~$200 each).
  4. One LLM call per member returns: comparative reasoning + conviction split (sums to 100).
  5. The page reveals each member's voice in turn — 5 cards, each showing the member's full position across the 3 institutions.
  6. After all 5 voices, the donation settles and the totals are tallied.
  7. Past donations save to your browser at /history.

What's next

Diego is iterating on this in public. The current shipping queue: a persistent council memory across donations, scheduled donations via Vercel Cron, and eventually a real on-chain treasury that disburses actual funding — the moment when the ceremony stops being a rehearsal.

The portraits are public-domain Wikimedia Commons images (or derivative crops of them). The institutions are real and accept donations directly through their own websites. Anything shown here is illustrative — no funds are actually moving in the V2.x demo. Currently V2.4 · 5 of 10 voice-tuned figures · 35-institution pool · Anthropic Claude Haiku · mock $1,000 treasury per donation.