A decade ago, Ryan Carrier was a failed hedge fund manager watching as AI systems began to spin out of control. Facebook’s algorithms shook US elections, a Microsoft chatbot said the Holocaust was “made up,” and Tesla’s Autopilot killed its first driver. “There was no governance, oversight, or accountability,” Carrier says. To him, the AI-filled future awaiting his children looked bleak.
Carrier went on that year to found ForHumanity, a nonprofit organization developing tools for auditing AI systems. It’s raised just hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016, and is still a minor player in the industry. But that could soon change, because ForHumanity is now among the many nonprofits around the world trying to rein in AI, get animals out of cages, eliminate poverty and sickness, or spread democracy, that are all eager to claim a slice of what’s widely anticipated to be the largest wave of philanthropy in decades.
Two nearly trillion-dollar AI companies, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Claude creator Anthropic, are expected to go public soon, making hundreds of current and former employees ultrawealthy. Some of them are aligned with a philosophy known as effective altruism that encourages making impactful donations sooner rather than later.
Anthropic’s seven founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth, and the company has agreed to chip in one or three shares for every one its employees commit to giving, depending on when they joined and up to a certain limit.
Rough estimates by a tech industry insider suggest that Anthropic’s IPO, which could happen in September, may result in $15 billion a year in additional philanthropic giving alone. That would be enough to boost total US giving by about 2.5 percent annually—the same as adding four Bill Gates’s, one of the world’s biggest donors. Anthropic declined to comment on the total amount its employees have set aside to donate and the organizations that may benefit.
All that money is far from guaranteed. The IPOs may get delayed or go poorly and leave employees clinging onto their wealth. Industry observers are also concerned that a paralyzing number of charitable options and natural fickleness could prompt workers to keep more for themselves than anticipated.
But competition for would-be donors’ attention is already fierce. Jack Lewars, a consultant who advised 13 ultrarich tech and finance workers on their charitable giving last year, says he’s heard that employees at the AI labs are receiving 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’re preparing for the potential philanthropy windfall. None of them admitted to sending cold pitches—a tactic that Lewars on his new blog, The Funding Anthropalypse, wrote “has next to no chance of working.” Instead, organizations say they are ramping up hiring, training, marketing, and use of automation to position themselves to attract massive sums of funding and quickly put it to use. One job posting at an education nonprofit even calls out building up 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, which claims to have funding from Anthropic employees. “It’s going to be a wild ride.”
The Inside Track
Like many nonprofit leaders who spoke with WIRED, ForHumanity’s Carrier says he’s focusing more on the work itself than on fundraising. But he recognizes this may be a moment to shift, and 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, putting out more research, and asking board members, such as AI scientist and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li, to introduce her to employees at the AI labs. Her organization trains young adults across the US to develop their own AI models, with the goal of diversifying the tech workforce. Lee says she’s setting “ambitious” fundraising goals because she’s confident the money will come, though introductory meetings haven’t materialized yet.
