AI wealth is bringing back effective altruism giving pledges

In short: Growing wealth around leading AI companies is helping revive “effective altruism”, a data-driven style of charitable giving that lost momentum after the FTX scandal.

What's going on

Effective altruism, often shortened to EA, is a movement that tries to donate money where it can do the most measurable good. You can think of it like comparing charities the way you might compare household budgets, using numbers to decide what helps the most.

The Financial Times reports that the AI boom is creating a new group of potential major donors. OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly filed confidential paperwork for initial public offerings, or IPOs (when a private company starts selling shares to the public). The companies are seeking valuations above $1tn, according to the report.

At Anthropic, the FT identified more than 60 current and former employees who have pledged on the “Giving What We Can” platform to donate at least 10 percent of their income. The report also says Anthropic’s seven co-founders, each estimated to be worth about $8bn, have separately pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth.

The movement is also seeing more money flow to charities it labels as “effective giving”. Donations tracked by Giving What We Can reached about $2bn in 2025 from 80,000 donors, up from $1.2bn a year earlier and under $300mn in 2018.

What to watch

A key question is whether this expected wave of AI money actually arrives, and whether charities can spend it well. Some people in the EA world say the bigger bottleneck is not cash, but time and capacity to review grants and scale projects. The movement also faces ongoing criticism that it can turn moral choices into spreadsheets, and it is trying to show stricter checks after Sam Bankman-Fried, a former EA supporter, was convicted of fraud tied to the collapse of FTX.

Source: Financial Times