Silicon Valley’s Next IPO Billionaires Are Coming. Nonprofits Are Ready for Them
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- ForHumanity founder Ryan Carrier launched his AI auditing nonprofit in 2016 after watching AI systems "spin out of control," but it has raised only hundreds of thousands of dollars since — he now wants to figure out how to get into Anthropic IPO events in San Francisco.
- Anthropic's seven founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth, and the company matches employee donations at 1 to 3 shares per share committed, depending on tenure and within set limits.
- Rough estimates by a tech industry insider suggest an Anthropic IPO could generate roughly $15 billion per year in additional philanthropic giving — enough to boost total US charitable giving by about 2.5 percent annually, equivalent to four Bill Gateses.
- AI lab employees reportedly receive as many as 20 unsolicited emails per week from nonprofits seeking donations, according to consultant Jack Lewars, who advises ultrarich tech and finance workers on giving.
- Coefficient Giving's largest donors, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, committed $1 billion to global health projects this month — nearly six times the original plan — to build infrastructure that can "effectively absorb much higher amounts of future giving."
- Venture capitalist Geoff Ralston co-authored an action plan calling for $2.5 billion over five years for AI biosecurity, planning to solicit from frontier lab employees who "understand the threat vectors created by AI better than anyone."
- Some nonprofits, including Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), are deliberately declining to seek funding from OpenAI and Anthropic to preserve their independence as evaluators of those companies' models.
Why it matters: Infrastructure-focused grantmakers like Coefficient are already committing $1 billion to build absorptive capacity for the coming surge, but the source surfaces a quieter concern: that existential-risk causes favored by effective altruists will crowd out human rights and online harms work, and that evaluator nonprofits accepting money from the labs they critique may compromise their independence — as METR's decision to walk away illustrates.
