Look How Much Money the AI Gods Are Giving Away

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, left, and Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president, in 2024. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

The artificial-intelligence gold rush was called into question this week by higher interest rates, spooking investors in leveraged AI plays and slowing revenue growth at Anthropic. Still, the boom has been producing a massive wealth explosion. But beyond the ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and a place in Kauai, where will all that money go?

To a varying degree, philanthropy—which for those at the top of the pyramid used to mean the Giving Pledge, an organization founded by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, whose more than 250 donors promise to give away half of their fortunes.

Instead, many of the new generation are turning to philanthropic organizations tied to the sometimes controversial philosophy known as effective altruism, or EA. And not only is EA upending charitable giving, but it’s also influencing companies like Google parent Alphabet , OpenAI, and especially Anthropic—the last two of which stand to mint many billionaires when they go public.

Effective altruism sounds simple: “It’s figuring out how we can do as much good as possible with our time and money, and then taking action on that,” Will MacAskill, an originator of the movement, tells me. But who decides what should be addressed? Effective altruists point to global poverty, animal welfare, climate change, and AI safety.

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“I don’t really understand” effective altruism, says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has given billions away through Salesforce (which has a multibillion-dollar stake in Anthropic) and personally, mostly to San Francisco−area hospitals and schools. “My philosophy is focused on how our community runs. That’s important to me because I’m the largest employer in San Francisco. My employees’ kids are in those middle schools. I have a lot of friends who do global philanthropy. I only know what I can put my hands on.”

“If you’re saving a life for a certain amount of money in a rich country, you can probably save 100 or 1,000 lives in poor countries,” MacAskill responds. “Maybe you think you have extra duties to your local community, but does that outweigh a factor of 100 or 1,000? I come from the perspective that all lives are equal.”

Effective altruism has high-end roots, going back to Australian philosopher Peter Singer, professor emeritus at Princeton University, and MacAskill and Toby Ord, both former University of Oxford scholars. These three have founded a number of connected nonprofits such as Giving What We Can and Founders Pledge, all eager (trigger warning) to redistribute wealth.

And there’s serious wealth here. Take the Good Ventures Foundation, ($10 billion in assets), co-founded and run by effective altruists Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook , and his wife Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Good Ventures has ties to GiveWell, founded by two former Bridgewater Associates employees. Tuna is on its board, as is an executive at the trading firm Jane Street. So is Daniella Amodei, who’s married to GiveWell’s co-founder Holden Karnofsky (now working at Anthropic). Amodei is the co-founder and president of Anthropic, and sister of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

EA has had some big-bang moments, like the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried and his colleague Caroline Ellison, who met at Jane Street and, motivated by effective altruism, tried to strike it rich and do good with it, or so they claimed. Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to a 25-year prison term for fraud, formerly had ties to MacAskill. “It was a huge blow to the movement, a betrayal and an embarrassment,” MacAskill says.

Still, the movement didn’t die. Before his fall, Bankman-Fried invested $500 million in Anthropic, which was founded by a group led by the Amodeis, who broke off from OpenAI in part because they found that company’s AI safety protocols deficient. As the New York Times put it, “No major AI lab embodies the E.A. ethos as fully as Anthropic.”

Look no further than Anthropic’s corporate structure. It incorporated as a “public-benefit corporation,” as Barron’s noted, and as such will pursue “responsible development…of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity,” whatever that might mean.

An attempt to throw out OpenAI CEO Sam Altman three years ago by its board over a lack of transparency and AI safety was essentially a failed EA coup, as dissenting board members had ties to effective altruism. Other tech potentates have EA bona fides, too. Demis Hassabis, chief scientist at Alphabet, has “long hired people aligned with the movement,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Billionaire developer of Skype and early Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn has been a major funder of EA causes.

How much money from the AI boom will flow into EA causes? Stripe executive Nan Ransohoff writes that the seven founders of Anthropic have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, which at its hoped-for valuation of $2 trillion, would be $90 billion.

Given that EA skews to data-driven, global philanthropy, you could argue that Bill Gates is an effective altruist and that the Giving Pledge should appeal to these billionaires-in-the-making. Perhaps, though, because of Gates’ association with Jeffrey Epstein, his divorce, Buffett’s age, and the fact that no young billionaire has been tapped to drive the Giving Pledge forward, interest in that organization has waned. To a degree, EA orgs fill that breach.

Benioff has some advice for the young guns. “Philanthropy takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” he says. “It isn’t something you can read about or that someone can advise you on. It’s through experience.”

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried and Ellison won’t go away. Ellison was recently hired by nonprofit Manifund, which caused quite the stir among EAers. And November brings a new Netflix miniseries on Ellison and Bankman-Fried. Its title: The Altruists.

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com

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