Late last year, as factory farming advocate Lewis Bollard prepared to go on the Dwarkesh Podcast, a must-listen among the AI insider crowd, host Dwarkesh Patel dropped a bombshell: he would put up as much as $250,000 of his own money to match listeners’ donations to FarmKind, a charity fighting factory farming.
For most podcast hosts, $250,000 is a season’s budget. Patel viewed it more as a high-stakes litmus test of his wealthy audience’s altruism.
Bollard, who was used to thinking of farm-animal welfare advocacy as a niche movement, had two immediate reactions: first, shock at the generosity of Patel’s offer. The second fear that the whole thing might flop So he quietly worked his donor list, lining up backup “sympathy donations” in case it did.
Patel wasn’t worried. He made the case for generosity in terms built for AI researchers: cost, scale and measurable suffering. A $1 donation, he said, could get ten hens out of battery cage confinement, the equivalent of alleviating 10 years of suffering. Then he asked listeners to meet the full $250,000 match. After the show he went harder, posting: “Bluntly, there are some listeners who are in a position to give much more. Given how neglected this topic is, one such person could singlehandedly change the game for 10s of billions of animals.”
His appeal worked. The $250,000 ceiling was met in under 2 days. As donations flooded in, Bollard and Patel scrambled to find other large donors willing to extend the match. By the end, the campaign had raised nearly $2.5 million. Bollard estimates that 80 to 90% of donors had never given to an anti-factory farming initiative. And most were rank-and-file AI lab employees.
For Bollard, who leads the campaign against factory farming at philanthropy fund Coefficient Giving, the $2.5 million boon was more than just a great week. It was a market signal, a glimpse of a massive, untapped pipeline of capital emerging from the AI boom.
The AI boom has created a new donor class: young, analytical, newly wealthy and eager to give money to causes they determine to be worthy. For advocates like Bollard, it’s a rare opening to steer Silicon Valley money toward causes traditional philanthropy has long neglected—starting with the billions of animals housed in factory farms.
So after the podcast, he worked with Patel to organize a casual series of dinners at big AI labs like OpenAI to talk about the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms. It paid off. Bollard said he’s netted $40 million in donations to anti-factory farming initiatives this year already. “With the young AI crowd, there’s way more of a willingness to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll just sign a million dollar check. Sure,” he said.
That makes this moment a particularly interesting one. According to Jamie Hackleman, head of the philanthropy center at J.P. Morgan’s private banking practice, as much as $300 billion could headed to philanthropic causes over the next few years and potentially be given away at a pace of about $30 billion a year.
The largest philanthropic whale is the OpenAI foundation, which holds a 26% ownership stake in OpenAI that is now valued at some $220 billion. Anthropic is another biggie: its seven founders who are each worth some $15.5 billion say they plan to give away 80% of their wealth. That makes the potential for AI-fueled philanthropy to eclipse legacy foundations like the $16 billion Ford Foundation and others is increasingly real. At $30 billion a year, AI-linked giving could account for 5% of the total $600 billion of annual giving in the U.S., according to the latest figures from the Giving USA annual report.
“What are you going to do in those final years?”
People involved in the AI community’s philanthropic efforts describe the new wave of giving as a race between wealth creation and technological upheaval. Because many AI researchers believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – the hypothetical point at which AI will automate most human labor – will arrive within several years, they are moving quickly to ensure that the post-AGI world is one of abundance. One way to do that is overclocking old school philanthropy’s slow rhythms by writing checks quickly.
Early Anthropic investor Nick Fitz said some young AI engineers are so convinced the global economy is headed for upheaval that they don’t even put money into 401ks. In their view, traditional retirement structures may not matter much if automated systems completely upend our economic order. Saheb Gulati, who advises the newly AI-wealthy on their giving strategy poses a blunter question: “Are you gonna start a B2B SaaS startup, or are you gonna try to help the future go well?”
At Founders Pledge, which encourages startup founders and early employees to commit future wealth to charity, new pledged value rose from just over $400 million in 2023, to $600 million in 2024, then $1.2 billion last year and more than $4 billion in the first six months of this year, according to data the organization shared with Forbes. AI founders now account for more than a third of all pledged value, making them the group’s largest category.
Links to effective altruism
At the tip of this AI philanthropic spear are the employees of Anthropic, a company whose origin story is closely tied to the effective altruism philosophy of strategic giving.
Founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who split from OpenAI over safety concerns, Anthropic’s culture was shaped early and heavily by effective altruism, a movement whose adherents try to give to philanthropic causes where their money is most likely to have the biggest impact. Anthropic’s earliest contracts reflected that worldview. The company’s job offers baked in a rare incentive for mission-driven hires: a staggering three-to-one donation matching agreement.
So why chickens? Or more specifically, why farm animals and not people? While human causes receive the vast majority of global donations, animal welfare has become an AI worker favorite largely because of EA’s evidence-first mentality. There is a big ROI on ending chicken suffering when $1 alleviates 10 years of misery. Not that there aren’t others: biosecurity and nuclear non-proliferation giving is popular. Medical research, job displacement and AI safety are also popular according to Hackleman.“The conversations come back to evidence-based impact and wanting to really give where the stakes are high, where they feel like they can have a high return on investment when it comes to the impact and that progress can be measured really clearly,” she said.
In AI’s own backyard, local advocates argue this spreadsheet-driven giving can miss the real-world fallout of the boom. “If they are not connected to the community that they’ve moved into, they might not see the harms that the AI boom is having on vulnerable San Franciscans,” Christin Evans, a San Francisco-based homelessness advocate, told Forbes.
A new breed of capital allocators
Sitting near the epicenter of the wealth explosion, Nick Fitz, the early Anthropic investor and his business partner Griff Bohm, have found themselves acting as late-night financial therapists to AI’s newly rich.
“There’s just a normal, very personal low-level anxiety of what it means to basically become a billionaire overnight,” Bohm said. “These people are by and large incredibly gifted computer scientists, and they’re not necessarily super fluent in finance or certainly philanthropy.”
Bohm and Fitz, who have both taken the Founders Pledge to donate 25% of their wealth, are working with early AI lab employees to build a new type of investment framework they are calling a “public venture.” The idea is to build a Y Combinator-style incubator that teaches talented 20-somethings how to run highly capitalized nonprofits with corporate-level compensation, clear metrics, and immense scale.
They, along with Matt Lerner, the research director for Founders Pledge, say they are optimistic this cohort could fundamentally rewrite the rules of modern giving. Lerner’s 16 person team has been researching how the philanthropy world can most effectively absorb a sudden tenfold surge in funding.
That’s the bull case. The bear case is decidedly conventional: people say they will give away their fortunes, then buy houses.
One expert who works with newly rich individuals said that so far, everything he’s seeing is familiar: people buying expensive, lavish homes in cash, rather than donating money to charity.
“We’re at the very early phase of this,” said Stephen Goldbart, the co-founder of the Money, Meaning and Choices institute in Northern California. “It is just starting to unfold. There’s more of this story that’s going to be told.”
For nonprofits, that means the opportunity is very real but not guaranteed. The AI boom may produce one of the largest new pools of philanthropic wealth in modern history. But converting it from paper wealth to real-world impact is far from a sure thing.
