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In 2022, Itsi Weinstock moved to the Bay Area to join a synthetic-cheese start-up. A machine-learning scientist from Sydney, he had long been passionate about animal welfare and hopeful about technology\u2019s capacity to improve it. Fake cheese fit his vision of a better future: a leap forward in the possible instead of merely a fight to preserve the natural. But recently he has taken on a new job. A friend introduced Weinstock to Senterra \u2014 a nonprofit that advises the rich on how to spend their wealth on projects that move society away from factory farming \u2014 with a unique opportunity. \u201cThe job,\u201d he told me over a vegan burrito, is to \u201cgo get the Anthropic money.\u201d<\/p>\n
In January, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a long essay<\/a> about the potential societal fallout from AI, most commentators focused on his discussion of the risks of the new technology. But philanthropies like Senterra noticed an announcement buried within: Amodei and his six co-founders had pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth. If staffers promise to donate up to 25 percent of their shares, the company will match their donations. Anthropic\u2019s latest valuation is $965 billion and Forbes estimates that each of its owners is worth $15.5 billion. That means over $86 billion could drop into charitable giving after the IPO \u2014 more than 250 times what the now-imprisoned investor, Sam Bankman-Fried, ever claimed to unleash and nearly 15 percent of all philanthropic giving in 2024.<\/p>\n Combine that with the $130 billion controlled by the OpenAI Foundation, said Matt Lerner, the managing director of research for Founders Pledge, which advises entrepreneurs on their charitable giving, and it is clear the \u201cinflux of capital from the AI sector is going to significantly change the philanthropic ecosystem.\u201d This is not only because of the massive sums of money but also because of the new rich\u2019s relationship to altruism. \u201cTraditional philanthropic orgs and people won\u2019t cut it,\u201d Stripe\u2019s Nan Ransohoff predicted in a blog<\/a> on the coming \u201cthird wave of American philanthropy.\u201d The AI moneyed will \u201cdemand tech-caliber talent and execution.\u201d<\/p>\n Weinstock\u2019s new job is to meet that desire. At Senterra, he spends most days advising people, including the soon-to-be AI rich, on how to spend their wealth on animal-welfare issues. Anthropic was created by defectors from OpenAI as part of a promise to use AI <\/a>to make the world better (or at least protect us from the technology doing evil). This ethos extends not only to the company\u2019s own work but to the profits it creates. Dario Amodei and his sister, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, and many other prominent Anthropic employees<\/a> have long been associated with the effective-altruism movement \u2014 a loose group that believes, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote<\/a> in The New Yorker, \u201cthat people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Dario came across<\/a> GiveWell, which helped establish the movement\u2019s American wing, in 2008, the year after it was founded. In 2017, Daniela married GiveWell co-founder Holden Karnofsky, who now also works at Anthropic. (\u201cWe are both excited about effective altruism,\u201d their wedding site<\/a> read.) When the Amodeis left OpenAI to found Anthropic in 2021, they were supported<\/a> by some of effective altruism\u2019s biggest funders: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Bankman-Fried. Among those thanked at the bottom of Dario\u2019s essay was Nick Beckstead, who had presided over effective altruism\u2019s first golden age as the head of Bankman-Fried\u2019s FTX Foundation.<\/p>\n Before Bankman-Fried was arrested in December 2022 for misappropriating billions of dollars of customer funds from his crypto exchange, EA had been the rising norm among major givers. (Stripe\u2019s Ransohoff in her blog calls the rise of tech billionaires, and their stringent guardrails for making sure charity was as useful as possible, the \u201csecond wave\u201d of philanthropy.) Bankman-Fried had briefly worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism and been convinced as an undergrad at MIT to \u201cearn to give\u201d by Will MacAskill, one of the movement\u2019s founders. As he started promising away tens of millions of dollars, the movement had more money and influence than ever. Glowing articles appeared in prominent publications. With that came extreme adulation for SBF, the boy king, including the proliferation of \u201cWWSBFD\u201d \u2014 What Would SBF Do \u2014 T-shirts.<\/p>\n Bankman-Fried\u2019s eventual arrest was a moment of profound humiliation for the movement. Higher-ups stepped away from their board seats and leadership roles. (MacAskill even considered stepping away from activism entirely to retrain and work as a DJ.) The broader public came to see EA as, at best, an insular annoyance, and, at worst, responsible for planting the ideas that drove Bankman-Fried\u2019s fraud. Since the scandal, the movement\u2019s organizations have shied away from the limelight and become extremely concerned with PR. For several years, their growth has been severely curtailed. But they survived. And the new AI money has given EA a chance to return and come back larger than ever before.<\/p>\n Many groups have just started thinking in concrete terms about the new AI rich and how to use their money after recent announcements of major IPOs, from SpaceX to Anthropic, and after the AI industry donated in large sums to try to sway primary races<\/a> in this year\u2019s midterms. But for EA communities the upcoming liquidity boom \u2014 and the new influence it will bring \u2014 is old news. Weinstock had come to dinner from a historic inn turned compound in Berkeley called Lighthaven where he had been hanging out with a small clutch of people who, for much longer, have been preparing for the tens of billions of dollars set to drop into philanthropy and politics.<\/p>\n Lighthaven was founded in late 2022 by the stewards of LessWrong, the largest forum for the Rationalist movement. The Rationalists have propagated their Bay Area philosophy \u2014 which emphasizes probabilistic reasoning above all else \u2014 online since the mid-aughts, and Lighthaven is their de facto real life headquarters<\/a>. Its founders think of it as something like a fin de si\u00e8cle Vienna coffeehouse, where people from different corners of their broader philosophical ecosystem can mingle. The atmosphere has attracted members of the EA movement. (The two groups are related, but not the same. EAs lean businesslike and professional; Rationalists are a bit stranger and more open to thinking beyond norms.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a gathering spot, an events space, a networking space,\u201d Mollie Gleiberman, a researcher who studies rationalist communities, said of Lighthaven, \u201cits role is to keep pushing on that Overton window. I think ASBs\u201d \u2014 Anthropic\u2019s soon-to-be-minted billionaires \u2014 \u201csee the value of Lighthaven, its role as the space where ideas can bubble up.\u201d (Though, she said, that doesn\u2019t mean funding the space itself would be a priority for the new rich.)<\/p>\n At Lighthaven, the coming gold rush has been discussed with feverish hope. The crowd had gone from merely speculating to strategizing and practically planning. What could they use all the money for? What charities could they fund? What politicians could be helped? What revolutions could they push?<\/p>\n Weinstock explained that our current moment gives certain philanthropic funders a rare opportunity. It is not only that the rich care about EA issues \u2014 ending factory farming, stopping nuclear war, halting climate change. But also the sheer amount of money sloshing around means that previously impossible EA moonshots are suddenly imaginable. \u201cThere will not be another transformative opportunity for the animal-welfare space,\u201d he told me. \u201cThis is it.\u201d<\/p>\n In April, I visited Lighthaven. The former inn\u2019s Victorian buildings on Telegraph Avenue are decorated in Solarpunk style: plants, ersatz and real, are scattered throughout, mingling easily with human life, proposing a less fraught future co-existence between nature and advanced technology. Inside, I found LED lights illuminating neo-Greco trim. When I went to the backyard, I found a vast lawn where sail-like sunshades were strung taut; below them residents plodded barefoot on regularly vacuumed Astroturf between clusters of couches and firepits. The staff scurried silently, earphones in, restocking fridges and picking up empty cans.<\/p>\n The days I spent on the campus were filled with intense conversations. Everywhere you looked were people circled up and trying to arrive at new conclusions from first principles. How did we develop taste? Is there anything to be learned from legal systems in video games? Is the workforce of philanthropic grant-makers large enough to efficiently distribute more than $80 billion? How do you develop the perfect lighting scheme? Pondering these sorts of questions alongside Weinstock were attendees of San Francisco\u2019s pro-billionaire march, writerly sex workers, several sci-fi novelists, and Slate Star Codex blogger Scott Alexander. It was somewhat jarring to hear people who look like they\u2019re late to an Ultimate Frisbee match flaunt their closeness to soon-to-be billionaires. But it wasn\u2019t unusual to wander into a designated shoeless room with a Wirecutter-recommended air purifier in the corner and find funders strategizing about how to pitch the newly moneyed.<\/p>\n Many of the residents were prominent, hobbled soldiers of effective altruism waiting for another shot. There was the editor of the effective-altruist online magazine Asterisk and there was the founder of an effective-altruist donor adviser fund, Longview. After the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, promised money for many disappeared overnight. Even if the funds were clawed back in the crypto firm\u2019s bankruptcy proceedings, it left the movement adrift.<\/p>\n Now, residents hoped, things were looking better. In March, Matt Reardon, a member of the wider Lighthaven community, published a widely discussed post titled \u201cEffective Altruism Will Be Great Again,\u201d which claimed that the movement could again rise to the heights it had reached during Sam Bankman-Fried\u2019s spending spree in 2022, if it was bold enough to meet the moment. \u201cNew projects will launch, ambition will again be the coin of the realm, and no one will be able to deny the underlying reality that a community formed of a commitment to understanding and bettering the world at scale is the reason why,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe only decision to be made is whether this will happen in spite of us or because of us.\u201d The Anthropic money, Reardon said, would be essential to this mission. \u201cI\u2019ve heard many comments just floating around,\u201d Reardon, who hangs out at Lighthaven, told me, \u201c\u2018When all the Anthropic money gets here, we\u2019ll be able to do X, Y, and Z.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At the former inn, the optimism about the good this money could bring is also closely accompanied by ambient panic about the technology\u2019s wider consequences. Ironically, the thing that many effective altruists want to do with their AI wealth to do the most good is fund organizations working to make sure AI is developed responsibly. The progenitor of rationalism, Eliezer Yudkowsky \u2014 a frequent presence at Lighthaven whose series of blog posts, \u201cThe Sequences,\u201d is the focus of a weekly study group at the campus \u2014 thinks the world shouldn\u2019t rule out nuking data centers in order to prevent humanity\u2019s destruction by superintelligence. AI doomsday is an anxiety that looms behind even the most prosaic conversations.<\/p>\n One afternoon, I stepped into a parking lot behind the main campus with a group of temporary residents. We passed an amateurishly rolled cigarette around, chatting amiably. My eye wandered to a rust-stained whiteboard leaning against a wall. Whatever was written on it had been largely erased. The surviving fragments cohered into a dystopian poem: \u201cin a stable oligarchy \/ empower the AIs \/ against shutdown \/ systems are \/ stop being shutdownable.\u201d<\/p>\n Naturally, then, amid the swirl of goals and causes, the one widely believed to be set to receive the most money was AI safety. PauseAI, which advocates for a moratorium on development, is the only major AI safety organization that doesn\u2019t accept funding from the industry as a matter of policy, but even they haven\u2019t ruled out donations from staffers of the large AI labs. \u201cThat would have to be the board\u2019s decision, not just mine,\u201d said Holly Elmore, founder and executive director of PauseAI US. \u201cThey might rule that it\u2019s against the interest of the org for me to say, \u2018No, I don\u2019t want to be part of this person\u2019s blood money.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Organizations whose coffers are willing to welcome support, surprisingly, include the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which was founded by Yudkowsky. \u201cMIRI would like to applaud and encourage people taking marginal right actions, even within larger systems that are moving in the wrong direction,\u201d said Malo Bourgon, MIRI\u2019s CEO. \u201cA polluting industry that pays for carbon offsets is better than a polluting industry that does not, for instance, even if it would be better overall for the industry to stop polluting entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n On a brutally sunny afternoon at Lighthaven, I scoured the campus for a quiet spot to call Peter Singer, the philosopher whose ideas about real-world utilitarianism in no small part inspired the effective-altruism movement, to ask about what all the money would mean. Amid the excitement over big philanthropic ideas, Weinstock had told me that he\u2019s also found himself empathizing with big tech\u2019s soon-to-be minted funders. \u201cSometimes they\u2019ll be like, \u2018I\u2019m really fucking stressed about this,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt is hard to receive ten or 100 million dollars and be someone who has come through the EA ecosystem and be like, \u2018You\u2019ve got to spend things in the world to do good things,\u2019 but having never had money before.\u201d I was curious what Singer thought about it all.<\/p>\n I settled on a giant upturned hand \u2014 referred to variously as \u201cThe Onion of Truth\u201d and \u201cThe Claw of Rationality\u201d \u2014 crawled in, sat back on the Astroturf lining its palm and fingers, and turned on our video call. Singer has hardly slowed since retiring from Princeton in 2024. When we spoke, he was in Seoul, trying to convince a major Korean company to donate 10 percent of its profits.<\/p>\n Of course, he\u2019s also been thinking about the Anthropic money. \u201cThere\u2019s been a bit of buzz going around EA people about how to do our best to ensure that the money that is going to come from Anthropic \u2014 which will be very significant \u2014 is used in the most effective possible way,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt could greatly affect the issues that I\u2019ve been concerned with, which includes trying to reduce extreme poverty in the world and give more people opportunities, and it could have a huge effect on reducing the suffering of animals in factory farming.\u201d<\/p>\n Singer has personally consulted with several effective-altruist organizations about the flood, including The Life You Can Save and Rethink Priorities. Other prominent EA organizations have been thinking about this too. This past November, Open Philanthropy \u2014 which had mostly worked on giving away Moskovitz and his wife\u2019s money \u2014 changed its name to Coefficient Giving. The organization said the shift was in part to make sure the coming rich realized they could use the organization\u2019s services<\/a>, too. \u201cIf even a fraction of the wealth being generated in AI flows to philanthropy,\u201d its spokesperson said, \u201cthat\u2019s a meaningful expansion of the pool of capital for high-impact work.\u201d<\/p>\n Singer thinks a chunk of the money will flow into American politics, too. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly extremely influential and heading in a direction that I think most people interested in the movement would not approve of,\u201d he said. Before defecting to tech, Daniela Amodei worked on Capitol Hill in the office of Democratic representative Matt Cartwright. The company\u2019s savvy with D.C. has already been on display. In February, Anthropic announced<\/a> it was granting $20 million to a new super-PAC to push for \u201cresponsible\u201d AI \u2014 with the New York Times framing the cash as counter to the spending by its rival OpenAI. Anthropic pouring millions into politics was framed as not\u00a0just about power for itself but safety for others.<\/p>\n In D.C., until very recently, conversations about how the AI rich will spend their new wealth had not filtered beyond effective-altruist circles. The obscurity is partly deliberate. EAs remember the grifters who superficially adopted their frameworks when the FTX money started flowing. They want to avoid that this time. \u201cYou really don\u2019t want to say to a bunch of people, \u2018Hey, there\u2019s going to be a bunch of money in this space very soon,\u2019\u201d said Keller Scholl, a longtime effective altruist and contractor with effective-altruist organizations. \u201cThe longer you can put that off, the safer you are from some of those corrosive effects.\u201d But their efforts haven\u2019t been entirely successful. \u201cI can definitely see a certain schmooziness showing up again, where it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh yes, I think very seriously about AI,\u2019\u201d said former effective altruism D.C. head Andy Masley. \u201cI know that that\u2019s a signal for, \u2018Fund me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a version of the future where the massive influx of funding for effective-altruist organizations never materializes. A good chunk of the money may just flow into the sorts of things wealthy people have always spent their money on: property, stocks, college endowments. \u201cThere\u2019s probably going to be a mad scramble to appeal to the new rich, but I also think a lot of that capital is going to go into stuff \u2014 into housing, into companies, into charitable trusts,\u201d said Samuel Hammond, the director of Artificial Intelligence Policy and chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation in D.C.<\/p>\n As Anthropic\u2019s prominence has grown, its leaders have drawn closer to more traditional sources of legitimacy and away from places like Lighthaven. At Cannes this year, Dario Amodei was set to co-host a party with<\/a> former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. At the last minute, he was not able to attend but other Anthropic executives did. At the same time, the Amodeis have also distanced themselves from the EA movement. \u201cI\u2019m not the expert on effective altruism,\u201d Daniela told<\/a> Wired last year. \u201cI don\u2019t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it\u2019s a bit of an outdated term.\u201d<\/p>\n But when I asked people at Lighthaven, no one really thinks this rhetoric means that Anthropic\u2019s soon-to-be rich will ignore EA causes. \u201cIt\u2019s such a poignant example of people being too calculating in the way that they present themselves,\u201d Reardon told me of Amodei\u2019s comment. He isn\u2019t sure who the money will specifically go to but doesn\u2019t doubt that much of it will be channeled through EA circles.<\/p>\n One evening, I chatted with Oliver Habryka, who built the Effective Altruism Forum, LessWrong, and Lighthaven. Bundled up in a knock-off Snuggie by the fire, he was telling me why he was conflicted about the many conversations his campus has hosted about how Anthropic\u2019s money should be spent. Then, he abruptly stopped. \u201cSorry, I almost set myself on fire,\u201d he said, in a nearly British accent, with traces of his native German, before recovering and rambling on. Many rationalists worried about larger things, but he seemed focused on the local.<\/p>\n \u201cInasmuch as there\u2019s a scene here at Lighthaven, that scene will be very drastically disrupted. It will be like a major force of nature that will suddenly change a lot of the vibes \u2026 attracting an infinitely large pool of grifters,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople trying to come to terms with that \u2014 somehow \u2014 I\u2019m pretty in favor. I\u2019m less excited by the people who are just going through the motions of how can I position myself in front of the infinite money spigot, which is a kind of thinking that, I think, will ultimately be responsible for a lot of the damage.\u201d<\/p>\n