The AI barons who say they’ll give it all away: a wave of pledges built on paper fortunes
David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. The stake he holds in Ineffable Intelligence, the London AI lab he founded after leaving DeepMind, is worth a fortune on paper. But he will not collect any of it himself. He set the company up that way, and he says every dollar he might ever make from it is destined for charities chosen for their ability to save lives.
Silver, the researcher behind AlphaGo, is the lead character in a WIRED story published August 9 that examines a new generation of AI-made billionaires preparing to give their wealth away. The magazine’s framing is deliberate and skeptical: a fortune promised with nothing to enforce it.
The pledge that comes before the fortune
Silver’s case is unusual because the giving is built into the structure. Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion in April at a $5.1 billion valuation, one of the largest seed rounds in European history, with Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Google, Nvidia, and the UK’s sovereign AI fund among the backers. The lab is pursuing a “superlearner,” an AI system designed to discover knowledge through reinforcement learning and experience rather than human-generated data, a return to the approach that produced AlphaGo’s breakthrough.
Silver told WIRED that every cent he might earn from the venture is earmarked for charities whose work demonstrably saves the most lives. The pledge is striking precisely because it is voluntary, unenforceable, and made before the fortune exists.
The wider wave
Silver is not alone. Anthropic’s seven cofounders, among them CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, committed in January to give away 80 percent of their fortunes, a pledge that could route tens of billions of dollars to philanthropy if the company’s valuation holds. Anthropic employees have made their own donation commitments, with the company matching contributions. The OpenAI Foundation, meanwhile, holds 26 percent of OpenAI, an asset worth hundreds of billions at current valuations and arguably the most unusual concentration of philanthropic capital ever created.
An analysis published in May by Nan Ransohoff attempted to size the coming wave: roughly $37 billion a year in intended giving from just three pools, the OpenAI Foundation, the Anthropic cofounders, and Anthropic employees. For scale, that approaches the entire annual output of the largest traditional foundations.
The skepticism is earned
The hesitation around these promises is not abstract. The Giving Pledge, the campaign that Bill and Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett started, now counts many of the richest people in technology among its signatories, yet reporting has repeatedly found that follow-through is slower and messier than the headlines suggest. Peter Thiel reportedly urged Elon Musk to abandon the pledge. And the cautionary tale closest to home for AI philanthropy is Sam Bankman-Fried, whose promises of effective giving ended in fraud charges and clawed-back donations that burned the very nonprofits he courted.
There is also a structural tension that the new pledges do not dissolve. AI wealth is being created at record speed: Oxfam calculated that billionaire wealth jumped 16 percent to $18.3 trillion last year, the highest level ever recorded, even as the inequality the philanthropists say they want to address keeps widening. Foundations funded by equity in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic concentrate extraordinary power over the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of the same people building the technology. That may be exactly the point of the exercise, or it may be the part that deserves the most scrutiny.
The question that remains
The new generation is different from its predecessors in one important way: they are pledging at the height of their careers, while their companies are still private and their fortunes still mostly theoretical. The promises are cheap to make and easy to walk back, which is why WIRED’s framing of a pinky promise lands. But the structures being built, the foundations, the matching programs, the corporate charters, are real. The question is whether the institutions will outlast the incentives, and whether the money, when it finally becomes liquid, will flow where the pledges said it would.