Fortunes from AI revive effective altruism after Sam Bankman-Fried turmoil

The AI boom is creating a new generation of ultra-wealthy philanthropists who are reviving the effective altruism movement, years after it was damaged by association with convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The FT has identified more than 60 current and former Anthropic employees who have pledged on the “Giving What We Can” platform to donate at least 10 per cent of their income, reflecting effective altruism’s emphasis on using evidence and data to maximise the impact of philanthropy.

Anthropic’s seven co-founders, who each have an estimated worth of about $8bn, have separately pledged to give away 80 per cent of their wealth, creating the prospect of billions of dollars in future donations.

Some of the company’s leaders, including chief executive Dario Amodei, are close to the EA movement, as are executives at other fast-growing Silicon Valley groups such as OpenAI. Both companies have confidentially filed paperwork to launch initial public offerings as early as this year, seeking valuations in excess of $1tn.

“There is an EA [effective altruism] slant to employees at these places, for sure,” said David Goldberg, president of Founders Pledge, an organisation that takes commitments from founders for “high-impact giving”.

The prospect of new AI-created wealth is breathing new life into a movement that was forced into a reckoning after FTX’s former chief Bankman-Fried — one of EA’s most prominent advocates — was convicted of fraud related to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.

The movement is already attracting record levels of funding. Donations to charities that Giving What We Can classifies as “effective giving” reached about $2bn in 2025 from 80,000 donors, up from $1.2bn a year earlier and less than $300mn in 2018.

“Giving What We Can had a hit from FTX,” said the platform’s chief executive Sjir Hoeijmakers. “There was a drop in general enthusiasm for EA a year after [SBF] . . . but we’ve more than recovered from that by now.”

EA directs donations towards causes that its supporters believe can deliver the greatest measurable impact including global health, animal welfare and AI safety, rather than more traditional philanthropy.

Among the organisations benefiting from EA-aligned funding is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which says additional funding could help expand the use of electric stunning for wild-caught shrimp after raising £2.2mn in 2024-25, up from £1.47mn a year earlier.

“We’re all preparing to be really, really ambitious, making sure that the money, if it does arrive . . . can be deployed fast, can be deployed effectively,” said Shrimp Welfare Project’s co-founder Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla.

EA’s emphasis on quantifying the value of different causes has long divided philanthropists, with critics arguing it reduces moral choices to calculations and concentrates funding in a narrow set of priorities.

Amy Schiller, author of The Price of Humanity, a book critical of the EA movement, wrote that: “The assumption is that maximising life, and subsequently human utility, is so important that it trumps all other priorities,” such as beauty and human flourishing.

The debate intensified after the collapse of FTX, when Bankman-Fried’s embrace of EA cast scrutiny on its philosophy of “earning to give” — the idea that people can do the most good by pursuing highly paid careers before donating much of their wealth.

The movement has also attracted criticism for championing “longtermism”, popularised by EA co-founder Will MacAskill, which argues that the interests of future generations are a key moral priority.

Wave of AI Wealth

This is the second article in a series looking at the extraordinary wealth created through AI

Part 1: Wealth managers cut fees to win AI’s paper millionaires

Part 2: AI fortunes revive effective altruism after Bankman-Fried turmoil

Part 3: The new AI super-rich’s spending on jets, yachts and cars

For organisations aligned with EA, the immediate challenge is whether the expected influx of AI wealth will materialise and, if it does, how well they can deploy it.

“There has been talk . . . that the amount of money that’s going to come into this space is so significant it will max out room for funding for a lot of organisations pretty quickly,” said Goldberg of Founders Pledge.

Ryan Kidd, who runs a large research fellowship in AI safety, said many organisations were already constrained less by funding than by their ability to evaluate grants and scale projects.

“We effectively don’t have a funding bottleneck in most areas of technical AI safety at the moment,” said Kidd, adding that “the main bottleneck” was grantmakers having insufficient time to make decisions and founders having the capacity to scale their enterprises.

As the fortunes from AI begin to reshape philanthropy, some leaders within EA say the movement is determined to avoid the issues associated with FTX.
Lewis Bollard, who directs the Farm Animal Welfare Fund at Coefficient Giving said: “One of the big lessons learnt [from FTX] is you need to be serious, you need to do your due diligence . . . It’s still critical that every dollar is really well spent.”

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco