These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyDavid Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence—the artificial intelligence lab he founded—is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way.

Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind. He specialized in reinforcement learning, a method of teaching an AI model through positive and negative feedback. In 2016, he led the development of AlphaGo, which became the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of Go and was heralded as a narrow form of superintelligence. Silver left to start Ineffable Intelligence in January, betting that reinforcement learning breakthroughs will close the gap between human and machine cognition across the board.

When he started Ineffable Intelligence, Silver raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation, reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history. He also vowed to donate all the money he makes from any future sale of his company to charity.

“I was thinking very deeply about what I could do to have the maximum impact on the world,” Silver tells WIRED in an interview at his office in Kings Cross, London, around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not just through the work I do, but through the finance I arrive at in the process.”

He’ll choose how to deploy the funds after he sells his company, he says, but his ambition is to save as many lives as possible.

Silver is the latest in a growing line of AI founders to pledge equity proceeds to charity. Others include Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind cofounder and the CEO of AI at Microsoft, and Anton Osika, the founder of automated coding platform Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, minting thousands of new millionaires in the process, the AI industry could soon come to represent an increasingly outsize proportion of tech philanthropy.

Along with a new generation of techno-philanthropists, though, comes a tangle of unresolved questions: Is philanthropy the most appropriate way to redistribute wealth? To what degree are megadonors responsible for some of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that scales with a company’s success come to justify unsavory business practices or reckless accelerationism? And is this go-around any different from previous iterations of Silicon Valley giving?

“You can’t necessarily appeal to capitalism to solve some of the problems created by capitalist practices themselves … the exacerbation of extreme wealth concentration and massive inequalities,” says Linsey McGoey, professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “It’s like calling upon the arsonist to hose down the house he’s just set on fire.”

Silver formalized his charitable commitment through Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs to give away their wealth. Unlike the Giving Pledge, a public but nonbinding commitment, Founders Pledge requires participants to enter into a contract. “The choice of making a binding pledge was very important,” says Silver.

Founders Pledge has been around since 2015. But the value of pledges recorded by the nonprofit has soared recently, from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion so far this year. The AI industry now accounts for a third of the lifetime pledge total.

The organization’s goal, according to cofounder David Goldberg, is to identify “the very best ways to deploy capital at scale to make the world better.” It has frequently been lumped together with effective altruism, which encourages people to amass wealth in order to give it away, to rely on statistics rather than emotion, and to prioritize causes likely to have the biggest impact in the distant future. But despite the commonalities, Goldberg isn’t a fan of the comparison; Founders Pledge is concerned with human suffering in the present. “We’re far more humanist,” he says.

Silver considers himself an effective altruist but says his “flavor is about the here and now.” Accordingly, Silver plans to funnel his pledge proceeds to charities, like the Malaria Foundation, equipped to save the greatest number of lives in the near term. “I find it hard to justify focusing on the galactic future of humanity when there are millions of people suffering and dying today,” he says.

Osika, the Lovable founder, who has pledged to give away half of his equity proceeds, doesn’t identify as an effective altruist, but he shares the belief that amassing wealth by succeeding in business is the best way for him to maximize his personal impact on the world. “I think it’s a very good thing for people who are very thoughtful about the future of humanity to build [AI],” he tells WIRED.

The Gates Foundation—the most famous embodiment of techno-philanthropy—has given away more than $100 billion to causes targeting poverty and disease in the 25 years since it was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to donate their $200 billion fortune to scientific research through their own foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Both have been held up as shining examples of how an entrepreneurial mindset can translate into effective philanthropy and how the profit motive can be harnessed for good.

The new generation of AI philanthropists appear to want to carry that legacy forward, into a world they imagine will be utterly reorganized by superintelligence. “For a very long time, it’s been clear to me that this technological transformation is going to be the biggest thing that happens in our lives,” says Osika.

However, this type of giving can come with trade-offs, and can be used by megadonors to discreetly advance their political interests, McGoey says. A recent study found that a reliance on philanthropic funding led the WHO to prioritize donors’ preferred causes at the expense of other urgent issues, like non-communicable diseases.

Donations that alleviate issues stemming from wealth inequality instead of attacking the root cause, McGoey argues, threaten to end the debate about long-term, systemic remedies before it begins. “It’s appealing to the perpetuator of a problem to resolve it—and that doesn’t necessarily lead to positive results,” she says. “I don’t think that people should kid themselves that making money on its own is somehow noble.”

The WHO itself has acknowledged issues with its financing, and in 2022 it put forth a new model designed to address some of those concerns. Mark Suzman, the Gates Foundation’s CEO, has also recognized the pitfalls of relying on megadonors. “It’s not right for a private philanthropy to be one of the largest funders of multinational global health efforts,” he said in 2023, noting that the foundation had become the WHO’s second-largest donor. But he also put the blame on dwindling governmental contributions. “I’d love it if many more governments would pass us on that list,” he said.

Megadonors can play a valuable role in funding causes neglected for ideological reasons by governments, like family planning. But they’re not equally accountable, says Apolline Taillandier, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who specializes in political theory. “These funders are not elected. They have no need to account for their decisions,” she says. “It comes down to the question of whether philanthropy is the most legitimate way of redistributing resources.”

There is a further risk that entrepreneurs might treat their philanthropic ambition as moral justification for destructive behavior. In 2024, the one-time crypto kingpin and effective altruism poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. At trial, a former colleague testified that Bankman-Fried had based all of his decisions on cold statistical analysis, gladly risking disaster if it meant a chance at a sufficiently positive end result. The leaders of effective altruism declared Bankman-Friend an apostate, but others painted his fraud as a symptom of the movement's flawed moral logic.

In the context of artificial intelligence, the concern is that a charitable pledge could form part of a risk calculation. By Bankman-Friedian logic, the headlong pursuit of superintelligence would be justified, potential consequences be damned, if the money it creates will have a large enough philanthropic impact.

Silver denies that his pledge is part of some sort of moral accounting or a hedge against the possible negative outcomes of the AI race. He believes that superintelligence will have a radically positive impact, endlessly discovering new knowledge through a recursive cycle of trial and error.

Far from justifying reckless accelerationism, Silver argues, a pledge helps to eliminate the type of financial incentive that threatens to lead AI development astray. “Building a superintelligence company is a huge responsibility to the planet, and that responsibility shouldn’t be led by personal greed,” says Silver. “This was an intentional choice to make sure that whatever actions I take as an individual are for the benefit of humanity, not because there’s some enormous dollar figure that starts to appear on the horizon.”

Silver may be a beneficiary of an economic system stacked in his favor. But one of few ways he can redress that imbalance, he argues, is to give his money away. “Individuals that choose to use their money for good will have a massive, transformative difference on the future of the world we live in,” he says. “That’s independent of whether the macroeconomic situation is the right thing for humanity. It’s just a fact.”

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