The Race for AI IPO Philanthropy: Nonprofits Position for The Biggest Giving Wave in Decades

Ten years ago, Ryan Carrier, a former hedge fund manager whose finance career had not panned out, watched as early artificial intelligence systems began to spiral into unregulated chaos. Facebook’s algorithms upended U.S. elections, a Microsoft chatbot publicly claimed the Holocaust was a hoax, and Tesla’s Autopilot was involved in its first fatal driver crash. “There was zero governance, no oversight, and no accountability for harm,” Carrier recalls. To him, the AI-driven future his children would inherit looked deeply grim.

That same year, Carrier launched ForHumanity, a nonprofit building independent tools to audit AI systems for harm. Since 2016, the group has raised just a few hundred thousand dollars, remaining a small, little-known player in the fast-growing AI industry. But that standing could shift quickly: ForHumanity is one of hundreds of nonprofits across the globe working on causes ranging from reigning in risky AI to ending factory farming, eradicating global poverty and disease, and expanding democratic access, all positioning themselves to claim a slice of what is widely projected to be the largest wave of new philanthropic giving in decades.

Two of the world’s most valuable AI startups, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Claude creator Anthropic, are expected to go public in the near future, a move that will turn hundreds of current and former employees into ultra-wealthy new donors overnight. Many of these early staff align with effective altruism (EA), a philosophy that prioritizes donating large sums to high-impact causes sooner rather than later. All seven of Anthropic’s founders have pledged to give away 80% of their IPO wealth, and the company has agreed to match employee donations: for every share an employee commits to giving, the firm adds 1 to 3 additional matching shares, depending on join date and up to a pre-set cap.

A rough estimate from a tech industry insider suggests Anthropic’s IPO, which could launch as early as September, could unlock $15 billion in new annual philanthropic giving from its employees alone. That would boost total annual U.S. charitable giving by roughly 2.5% — the equivalent of adding four new Bill Gates-level donors, matching the total giving output of one of the world’s largest philanthropists. Anthropic declined to comment on the total value of pledged employee donations or which nonprofits may benefit.

None of this projected giving is guaranteed. IPOs could be delayed, derailed by poor market conditions, or leave employees holding onto their new wealth instead of donating. Industry observers also warn that an overwhelming number of charitable options and shifting donor priorities could lead workers to keep far more of their windfall than early projections predict. Even so, competition for these would-be donors is already fierce. Jack Lewars, a consultant who advised 13 ultra-wealthy tech and finance workers on their charitable giving last year, says he has seen AI lab employees receive as many as 20 unrequested outreach emails a week from groups seeking donations.

WIRED interviewed 18 nonprofits and reached out to dozens more to ask how they are preparing for the potential giving boom. None of the groups admitted to sending cold outreach pitches — a tactic Lewars writes on his new blog The Funding Anthropalypse “has next to no chance of working.” Instead, organizations report they are ramping up hiring, staff training, marketing, and automated operations to position themselves to attract large sums and deploy funding quickly once it arrives. One job posting at a U.S. education nonprofit even explicitly lists building relationships with Anthropic staff as a core role priority.

“Everybody’s going to go after these funds,” says Christine Peterson, co-founder of grantmaking group Foresight Institute, which has already secured funding from Anthropic employees. “It’s going to be a wild ride.”

The Inside Track

Like many nonprofit leaders who spoke with WIRED, ForHumanity’s Carrier says he has traditionally prioritized the group’s core work over aggressive fundraising. But he recognizes this moment could be a game-changer, and has already started exploring how to gain access to exclusive IPO events in San Francisco. “I just have to get in that room,” Carrier says.

Bo Young Lee, CEO of nonprofit AI4ALL, says she is attending more industry events, publishing more original research, and asking her board members — including prominent AI scientist and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li — to make introductions to employees at the leading AI labs. AI4ALL trains young adults across the U.S. to build their own AI models, with a core mission of diversifying the overwhelmingly homogeneous tech workforce. Lee says she has set “ambitious” fundraising targets because she is confident the funding will materialize, though introductory meetings with major potential donors have not yet locked in.

Buck Shlegeris is CEO of Redwood Research, a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit part of a growing network of small groups working on broadly defined AI safety. From his perspective, targeting individual AI employee donors directly is not an optimal strategy. Redwood already receives millions in funding from grantmaking intermediaries such as Coefficient Giving and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which pool individual donations and align with the effective altruism movement. Shlegeris expects new IPO wealth will flow first to these intermediaries, then trickle down to frontline groups like Redwood.

He says the nonprofit is focused on training existing staff to step into management roles, in anticipation that large new sums of funding will allow teams to expand and take on “crazy expensive projects” such as automating safety research and training Redwood’s own proprietary AI safety models. The nonprofit’s core goal is to reduce the risk that unaligned advanced AI could eventually lead to human extinction — an outcome Shlegeris says he believes has a “really strong chance” of occurring.

A key branch of AI safety research centers on stopping bad actors from using AI to design new bioweapons. Venture capitalist Geoff Ralston recently co-authored an action plan calling for raising $2.5 billion over the next five years to address AI biosecurity risks, and he plans to solicit donations from employees poised to benefit from the coming IPO windfall. “The folks at frontier labs understand the threat vectors created by AI better than anyone,” Ralston says.

Many influential grantmakers in EA circles are preparing for the giving wave by helping newer nonprofits strengthen their administration and bookkeeping, to ensure more organizations are ready to spend the expected influx of donations. “We’re trying to build the port before the ship arrives,” says Stien van der Ploeg, executive director at Animal Charity Evaluators, which over the past year helped direct roughly $15 million to nonprofits working to end the worst forms of factory farm cruelty.

Similarly, Coefficient is ramping up support for emerging high-impact groups. This month, the group’s largest donors, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, committed $1 billion to global health projects. Coefficient calls the commitment a “one-off surge” nearly six times larger than initially planned, made to create “scalable opportunities” that can “effectively absorb much higher amounts of future giving.”

GiveDirectly, another nonprofit popular among effective altruists that distributes unconditional cash transfers to people in poverty or crisis, says it has quietly raised a preparatory funding round from existing donors to get ready for the giving wave. The nonprofit is using this seed funding to hire more engineers to automate its finance and HR systems, build partnerships to deploy emergency aid faster after natural disasters, and develop a blueprint for a “global AI wealth dividend” to fund people living in extreme poverty. “Despite the uncertainty” around the IPOs, says GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice, “it’s a moment worth taking very seriously.”

More Cautious

Some organizations worry they will be left behind, whether because they are disconnected from San Francisco’s insular AI community, or work on issues such as child online safety or political disinformation that do not align with the assumed priorities of potential new donors. A widespread shared anxiety is that the flood of new money will leave a small set of favored causes overflowing with coffers, while other equally urgent issues attract almost no funding.

For example, groups addressing AI existential risk — a top priority for most effective altruists — are widely projected to receive far more backing than groups working to advance human rights, such as fighting mass surveillance or mitigating systemic online harms. That possibility has kept Marlena Wisniak up at night. She leads digital strategy at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), which works on AI policy and research, and has focused on lifting the profile of overlooked organizations, particularly those in the Global South. This month, she scored a small victory when a contact who works at Anthropic donated $100,000 to one underfunded group fitting that description.

Wisniak is now working to convince contacts at OpenAI and Anthropic to share her list of worthy human rights and social justice organizations with their colleagues. She also encourages these nonprofits to frame their work using terms like “theory of change” and “evidence-backed” that resonate more strongly with effective altruists.

A small number of organizations are deliberately opting out of pursuing this funding. Earlier this year, Model Evaluation and Threat Research, an independent nonprofit that audits OpenAI and Anthropic models, chose not to solicit funding from employees at the two companies over fears it would jeopardize the group’s independence. Other groups are concerned that accepting EA-aligned funding will link them to the movement, which has been widely criticized as insular and misguided, and scare off existing partners or other donors, according to an anonymous source familiar with the nonprofits’ thinking. (A communications advisor for several EA-aligned organizations, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the movement “has continued to grow its funding, talent, and impact, and the increasing willingness of major funders to work with EA-aligned groups reflects that these purported reputational fears are overblown.”)

Many veteran nonprofit industry leaders are urging general caution. They warn groups against neglecting their core work by reshaping their projects to fit a mold that appeals to the new wealthy donors. It also has not gone unnoticed by fundraisers that this new wealth is a byproduct of building AI tools that, in many cases, are worsening the very problems nonprofits are working to solve.

“The risk today is this industrialized wealth from these IPOs may not serve human good in hindsight,” AI4ALL’s Lee says. “We have to avoid the allure of easy money simply to appease the prioritization of the wealthy.”

One effect of the anticipated funding surge is already emerging: as philanthropic funding concentrates in a handful of fields with limited talent pools, nonprofit salaries are rising sharply. This month, Resolution, an AI safety nonprofit, announced a $160 million grant from Coefficient, the donor network’s largest award of its kind. The funding combined with the “enormous influx of philanthropic capital” following the AI IPOs will allow Resolution to pay “well above nonprofit and academic norms,” the organization wrote in a blog post.