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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’s 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 — a nonprofit that advises the rich on how to spend their wealth on projects that move society away from factory farming — with a unique opportunity. “The job,” he told me over a vegan burrito, is to “go get the Anthropic money.”

In January, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a long essay 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’s 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 — 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.

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 “influx of capital from the AI sector is going to significantly change the philanthropic ecosystem.” This is not only because of the massive sums of money but also because of the new rich’s relationship to altruism. “Traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it,” Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff predicted in a blog on the coming “third wave of American philanthropy.” The AI moneyed will “demand tech-caliber talent and execution.”

Weinstock’s 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 to make the world better (or at least protect us from the technology doing evil). This ethos extends not only to the company’s own work but to the profits it creates. Dario Amodei and his sister, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, and many other prominent Anthropic employees have long been associated with the effective-altruism movement — a loose group that believes, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker, “that people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible.”

Dario came across GiveWell, which helped establish the movement’s 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. (“We are both excited about effective altruism,” their wedding site read.) When the Amodeis left OpenAI to found Anthropic in 2021, they were supported by some of effective altruism’s biggest funders: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Bankman-Fried. Among those thanked at the bottom of Dario’s essay was Nick Beckstead, who had presided over effective altruism’s first golden age as the head of Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation.

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’s Ransohoff in her blog calls the rise of tech billionaires, and their stringent guardrails for making sure charity was as useful as possible, the “second wave” of philanthropy.) Bankman-Fried had briefly worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism and been convinced as an undergrad at MIT to “earn to give” by Will MacAskill, one of the movement’s 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 “WWSBFD” — What Would SBF Do — T-shirts.

Bankman-Fried’s 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’s fraud. Since the scandal, the movement’s 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.

Many groups have just started thinking in concrete terms about the new AI rich and how to use their money after recent announcements of........

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