A potential wave of AI-generated wealth is already changing how nonprofits think about fundraising. Organizations working on AI governance, AI safety, animal welfare, poverty, health and democracy are preparing for a moment that could bring unusually large donations from employees at major AI companies.
The focus is on OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, creator of Claude. Both are described as nearly trillion-dollar AI companies expected to go public soon, a move that could make hundreds of current and former employees ultrawealthy.
Why Nonprofits Are Watching AI IPOs
The central reason is simple: new public listings can turn employee equity into liquid wealth. If that happens at OpenAI and Anthropic, some workers may suddenly have the ability to make large charitable gifts.
That prospect matters because some people connected to the AI industry are aligned with effective altruism, a philosophy that encourages donors to direct money toward work they believe can have high impact and to give sooner rather than later.
Anthropic is especially important in this story. Its seven founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth. The company has also agreed to contribute one or three shares for every one its employees commit to giving, depending on when they joined and up to a certain limit.
One rough estimate from a tech industry insider suggests that Anthropic’s IPO, which could happen in September, may create $15 billion a year in additional philanthropic giving alone. The source article says that would increase total US giving by about 2.5 percent annually, comparable to adding four Bill Gates’s. Anthropic declined to comment on the total its employees have set aside to donate or which organizations could benefit.
The Money Is Not Guaranteed
The expected philanthropy boom is still conditional. IPOs may be delayed. They may perform poorly. Employees who become wealthy on paper may choose to hold onto more of their wealth than observers expect.
There is also a practical challenge: donors will have many choices. Industry observers worry that a crowded field of causes and organizations could slow decisions or reduce the amount that ultimately moves into nonprofits.
Competition for attention has already started. Jack Lewars, a consultant who advised 13 ultrarich tech and finance workers on charitable giving last year, says he has 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 about how they are preparing. None said they were sending cold pitches. Lewars wrote on his blog, The Funding Anthropalypse, that the tactic “has next to no chance of working.”
How Organizations Are Preparing
Instead of relying on cold outreach, nonprofits say they are strengthening the machinery needed to attract and use large donations. That includes hiring, training, marketing and automation.
ForHumanity, founded by Ryan Carrier in 2016, is one example. Carrier started the nonprofit to develop tools for auditing AI systems after watching AI-related failures and harms emerge. He says there was “no governance, oversight, or accountability.”
ForHumanity has raised only hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016 and remains a small player. But Carrier now sees a chance to shift. Like other nonprofit leaders, he says the work remains the priority, yet he is also thinking about how to get into IPO events in San Francisco. “I just have to get in that room,” Carrier says.
AI4ALL is also positioning itself for the moment. CEO Bo Young Lee says she is attending more events, publishing more research and asking board members, including AI scientist and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li, to introduce her to employees at AI labs. AI4ALL trains young adults across the US to develop their own AI models, with a goal of diversifying the tech workforce. Lee says she is setting “ambitious” fundraising goals, though introductory meetings have not yet materialized.
Intermediaries May Shape Where Funds Go
Some nonprofits do not expect to win donors one by one. Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research, argues that targeting individual donors is not the best path for his organization.
Redwood Research, based in Berkeley, California, works in the area broadly described as AI safety. It has received millions of dollars from grantmaking groups including Coefficient Giving and Survival and Flourishing Fund, which pool donations from individuals and are connected to effective altruism. Shlegeris expects new money to flow first into such intermediaries and then down to groups like Redwood.
He also says Redwood wants to train staffers to become managers more quickly, because larger funding could allow teams to grow and pursue “crazy expensive projects,” including automating safety research and training Redwood’s own models. The organization’s broader goal is to reduce the risk that AI could somehow lead to human extinction, which Shlegeris says he fears has a “really strong chance” of happening.
AI biosafety is another area seeking support. Venture capitalist Geoff Ralston recently helped author an action plan calling for $2.5 billion over the next five years to address AI biosecurity. He plans to seek donations from people who benefit from the possible IPO windfall. “The folks at frontier labs understand the threat vectors created by AI better than anyone,” Ralston says.
Scaling Before the Funding Arrives
Grantmakers influential in effective altruism circles are preparing newer nonprofits to handle more money. The concern is not only whether donations arrive, but whether organizations can spend them responsibly and quickly.
Animal Charity Evaluators is helping groups improve administration and bookkeeping. Executive director Stien van der Ploeg says, “We’re trying to build the port before the ship arrives.” The organization helped direct about $15 million over the past year to nonprofits trying to reduce what they view as the worst forms of farm cruelty.
Coefficient is also supporting emerging organizations. Its largest donors, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, committed $1 billion to global health projects. Coefficient described the commitment as a “one-off surge” nearly six times bigger than initially planned, intended to create “scalable opportunities” that can “effectively absorb much higher amounts of future giving.”
GiveDirectly, another organization popular among effective altruists, says it quietly raised funding to prepare for the giving wave. The nonprofit transfers unconditional cash to people in poverty or crisis. It is hiring more engineers to automate finance and HR systems, building partnerships to deploy money faster during natural disasters and developing a plan for “a global AI wealth dividend” to fund people in extreme poverty.
GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice says that “despite the uncertainty” around the IPOs, the moment is “worth taking very seriously.” That captures the broader nonprofit mood: the opportunity may never arrive as imagined, but many organizations are already reorganizing around the possibility that it will.