Ryan Carrier watched Facebook algorithms shake US elections and a Microsoft chatbot claim the Holocaust was made up. He saw Tesla’s Autopilot kill its first driver. He called the lack of governance in that future bleak. Carrier founded ForHumanity to audit AI systems. The nonprofit has raised just hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016. It remains a minor player in the industry. That could soon change. ForHumanity is among many groups trying to rein in AI, free animals from cages, eliminate poverty, and spread democracy. They are eager to claim a slice of the largest wave of philanthropy in decades.
OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to go public soon. These two companies are worth nearly a trillion dollars combined. Hundreds of current and former employees are set to become ultrawealthy. Some of them follow effective altruism. This philosophy encourages impactful donations sooner rather than later.
Anthropic’s seven founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth. The company has agreed to match employee contributions with one or three shares for every one given. The match depends on when the employee joined and hits a certain limit.
A tech industry insider estimates Anthropic’s IPO could generate $15 billion a year in additional philanthropic giving alone. That figure would boost total US giving by about 2.5 percent annually. It is the equivalent of adding four Bill Gates to the donor pool. Anthropic declined to comment on the total amount its employees have set aside or the organizations that may benefit.
All that money is far from guaranteed. The IPOs may get delayed or go poorly. Employees might cling onto their wealth. Industry observers worry a paralyzing number of charitable options and natural fickleness could prompt workers to keep more for themselves than anticipated.
Competition for would-be donors is already fierce. Jack Lewars, a consultant who advised 13 ultrarich tech and finance workers on their charitable giving last year, says employees at AI labs receive as many as 20 unsolicited emails a week from groups seeking donations.
WIRED spoke with 18 nonprofits and approached dozens more to ask how they are preparing for the potential windfall. None admitted to sending cold pitches. Lewars wrote on his blog, The Funding Anthropalypse, that this tactic has next to no chance of working. Instead, organizations say they are ramping up hiring, training, marketing, and automation. They want to position themselves to attract massive sums of funding and use it quickly. One job posting at an education nonprofit even calls out building relationships at Anthropic specifically as a priority.
“Everybody’s going to go after these funds,” says Christine Peterson, cofounder of the grantmaking group Foresight Institute. “It’s going to be a wild ride.”
The Inside Track
ForHumanity’s Carrier says he is focusing more on the work itself than on fundraising. He recognises this may be a moment to shift. He has begun wondering how to get into IPO soirees in San Francisco. “I just have to get in that room,” Carrier says.
Bo Young Lee, CEO of the nonprofit AI4ALL, says she is attending more events and putting out more research. She is asking board members, such as AI scientist and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li, to introduce her to employees at AI labs. Her organization trains young adults across the US how to develop their own AI models. The goal is to diversify the tech workforce. Lee says she is setting “ambitious” fundraising goals because she is confident the money will come, though introductory meetings have not materialised yet.
Buck Shlegeris is the CEO of Redwood Research. This Berkeley, California-based nonprofit is part of a growing set of small organisations pursuing what is broadly defined as AI safety. He says targeting individual donors is not an optimal strategy. He wants to accelerate training staffers on becoming managers. He expects big sums of money will enable teams to grow. They could take on “crazy expensive projects,” like automating safety research and training Redwood’s own models. The nonprofit’s overall goal is to minimise the risk that AI could lead to human extinction. Shlegeris says he fears this has a “really strong chance” of happening.
A subset of AI safety research is centred on preventing the technology from being used in the creation of bioweapons. Venture capitalist Geoff Ralston recently helped author an action plan. It calls for raising $2.5 billion over the next five years to address AI biosecurity. He plans to solicit donations from those who stand to benefit from the IPO windfall. “The folks at frontier labs understand the threat vectors created by AI better than anyone,” Ralston says.
Several grantmakers influential in effective altruism circles are preparing for the giving wave. They help newer nonprofits level up their administration and bookkeeping. The goal is to ensure more organisations are ready to spend the expected influx of donations. “We’re trying to build the port before the ship arrives,” says Stien van der Ploeg, executive director at Animal Charity Evaluators. The group helped direct about $15 million to nonprofits trying to reduce what they view as the worst forms of farm cruelty over the past year.
Similarly, Coefficient is making a push to support up-and-comers. This month, its largest donors, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, committed $1 billion to global health projects. It is a “one-off surge” nearly six times bigger than initially planned. It was made with the intention of creating “scalable opportunities” that can “effectively absorb much higher amounts of future giving,” according to Coefficient.
GiveDirectly, another organisation popular among effective altruists, says it discretely raised a round of funding from donors to support its preparations. The nonprofit transfers unconditional cash to people in poverty or crisis. It is using the money to bring on more engineers to automate its finance and HR systems. It is also forging partnerships to deploy money faster during natural disasters. It has begun developing a plan for “a global AI wealth dividend” to fund people in extreme poverty. GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice says “despite the uncertainty” around the IPOs, it is a moment “worth taking very seriously.”
More Cautious
Some organisations worry they will be left behind. They are removed from the San Francisco AI community or work on issues such as child safety or political disinformation. These areas may not overlap with the assumed priorities of potential donors.
One broadly shared anxiety is that the sheer amount of money could leave some causes with overflowing coffers. Other urgent issues may attract little funding. For instance, groups addressing the existential risks AI poses to humanity are widely predicted to receive far more backing. These groups include those trying to improve human rights by fighting mass surveillance or online harms.
That possibility has been keeping Marlena Wisniak up at night. She oversees digital strategy at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law. The group works on AI policy and research. She has been trying to raise the profile of organisations that may be overlooked, especially in the global south. This month, she scored a victory when a friend who works at Anthropic donated $100,000 to one group that fits that description. Wisniak is now trying to convince contacts at OpenAI and Anthropic to share her list of human rights and social justice organisations worth supporting with their colleagues. She is also encouraging those nonprofits to frame their work using terms like “theory of change” and “evidence-backed”. These terms might better resonate with effective altruists.
A few organisations are deliberately sitting out the moment. Earlier this year, Model Evaluation and Threat Research decided against soliciting funding from employees at those companies. It could jeopardise the nonprofit’s independence. Other groups are concerned about receiving funding from sources that would link them to effective altruism. This could scare away partners or other donors. The movement has been criticised as insular and misguided, according to a person familiar with the thinking of the nonprofits who sought anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. A communications adviser to several organisations aligned with effective altruism but not authorised to speak on their behalf says the movement “has continued to grow its funding, talent, and impact, and the increasing willingness of major funders to work with EA-aligned groups reflects that these purported reputational fears are overblown.”
Some veterans of the nonprofit industry are urging general caution. They do not want groups to neglect their core work by contorting their projects to fit a mold appealing to the new money. It is also not lost on fundraisers that the wealth is a byproduct of building AI tools that, in some cases, are worsening the problems that nonprofits are tackling. “The risk today is this industrialized wealth from these IPOs may not serve human good in hindsight,” AI4ALL’s Lee says. “We have to avoid the allure of easy money simply to appease the prioritization of the wealthy.”
One effect of the anticipated funding surge is already emerging. As philanthropic funding concentrates in a handful of fields with limited talent pools, salaries are rising. This month, Resolution, an AI safety nonprofit, announced a $160 million grant from Coefficient. It is the donor’s largest award of its kind. The funding combined with the “enormous influx of philanthropic capital” following the AI IPOs will allow Resolution to pay “well above nonprofit and academic norms,” the organisation said in a blog post.
What it means
Nonprofits are actively changing their operations to handle sudden wealth. They are hiring more staff and automating finance systems. Some are framing their missions in specific ways to appeal to donors. Others are refusing the money to protect their independence. The result is a shift in power where a few fields will see salary spikes while other urgent causes struggle for attention.
