What do the great fortunes made from artificial intelligence owe the rest of us? Over the last year, as a new class of tech billionaires began to reckon with a growing A.I. backlash, they have floated a number of compensatory proposals, almost like trial balloons for a new social compact: a “universal basic income,” paid in compute; a “New Deal” for A.I.; a commitment to income redistribution; and a “shared A.I. prosperity.” We may be about to get another vision, from what Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff predicted recently would be “the third wave of American philanthropy.” The first wave involved the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, and the second the developmental philanthropy embodied through the Obama years by the Gates foundation and the Giving Pledge. The third, Ransohoff suggests, will be an absolute tidal wave: hundreds of billions of dollars in A.I. wealth, freed up by a series of upcoming I.P.O.s and unleashed on the world in relatively short order.
Perhaps $370 billion in charitable money will rapidly become liquid in the coming months, Ransohoff estimates, enabling somewhere between $37 billion and $100 billion in annual giving.
This is, simply put, a world-shaping amount of cash — or could be, depending on how it might be spent. It reminds me of that criminally underappreciated fact, that one billion is a thousand millions. And, relatedly, that the sort of people who can throw around figures enumerated in the billions don’t exactly live on the same plane as the rest of us. They are increasingly seen that way, too, by a suspicious nation that — despite such awesome reverence for entrepreneurship it can resemble a state religion — regards almost none of the richest Americans favorably. Philanthropy used to be one way that plutocrats persuaded the public of the virtue of wealth and the value of business. These days, it seems just as likely to inspire backlash — seen by an increasingly skeptical public as an end run around not just taxation but civil society and public oversight, too.
We will see just how much cash flows out of those I.P.O.s, and how much of it actually flows out quickly into philanthropic spending. But even on the low end of Ransohoff’s range, this new money could mean four times as much as the Gates Foundation now pays out annually, and more than six times as much as that foundation used to distribute. The OpenAI Foundation is already larger than the Gates Foundation in terms of assets.
Once, not long ago, the sudden arrival of this amount of new philanthropic money would have been hailed, pretty universally, as a godsend. And the third wave is poised to arrive in the wake of some world-historical achievements by the philanthropists who came just before. The Gates Foundation, for instance, has a plausible claim to having helped save 82 million lives, though it has also launched high-profile initiatives that have failed, introduced policy-distorting spending in some developing countries and generated a sometimes conspiratorial backlash to its work around the world.
The vaccine alliance Gavi boasts more than 18 million lives saved. The charity portal GiveWell claims 340,000 lives saved around the world, and what was once Open Philanthropy and is now Coefficient Giving has a defensible case for having saved over 100,000. The broader effective altruist movement of which both are a part can reasonably estimate 200,000 lives saved through the distribution of bed nets for malaria. These are all enormous achievements — and there are others to boast about, too, as Scott Alexander detailed a few years ago, after Sam Bankman-Fried generated a wave of bad press for the movement that he’d done so much to fund. E.A. spending, Alexander calculated, is now saving 50,000 lives each year.
But even in the wake of those achievements, this looks like a strange and not especially hospitable political environment into which a new overclass of philanthropists may be parachuting. The third wave of philanthropy, should it materialize, will be an unmistakable outgrowth of the A.I. boom, about which Americans are already — and increasingly — anxious and resentful. It will arrive amid a new, fraught politics of extreme wealth, which has come to cloud more of American social and political life than it did even in the years of Occupy or Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns — not just because extreme wealth has grown substantially since the 2008 financial crisis but because political spending by billionaires grew more than 150-fold, too. And it will come at a time when the country’s superelite often sound as anti-establishmentarian as anyone in the 99 percent, often trash-talking collective action and government spending. Perhaps this is one reason their nonprofit spending can look a bit less like “giving back” to those with less and a bit more like an assertion of plutocratic control over yet more aspects of collective life — even if you’re very glad to see the money donated rather than hoarded.
The culture of philanthropy has been changing, too, as I wrote last year — shifting from the focus on development and inequality in the era of the Gateses and the Giving Pledge “to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity.” The number of new signers to the Giving Pledge has dwindled, in recent years, and some have predicted there will be a year soon when more people leave the group than join it. In 2024, Warren Buffett announced that he’d be leaving his wealth not to the Gates Foundation but to his children.
This may all sound like a story about the world’s very richest people, but the recent pattern isn’t confined to the tiniest top sliver of the income distribution, where the centibillionaires live. As Jeremy Ney and Zoe Siegel recently highlighted, two decades ago, about two-thirds of American households donated to charity, a pattern long recognized as distinctly American — at least, as the country used to define and distinguish itself. According to Ney and Siegel, in 2024, that share was just 41 percent, with much of the decline concentrated in the last ten years. Among the well-off, who have always given more generously, charity has dropped dramatically, too: Twice as many rich households now make no charitable donations as in 2015.
Perhaps the third wave of philanthropy will arrive to fill that gap, in the way that consumer spending by the richest Americans has grown to dominate all household expenditure. But to what end will it all be directed? My colleague Ross Douthat made a plea, this weekend, that the new philanthropists consider beauty, invoking the first-wave example of all those Gilded Age libraries and concert halls and universities. Presumably, much of the new money will be directed toward causes familiar from the recent second wave — not just because of natural continuities but because the effective altruism worldview, so common among those shaping the future of A.I., shares an intellectual lineage with Gates-style giving and the philosopher Peter Singer. Among the many things Coefficient Giving spends its money on, for instance, are air quality, lead pollution, developmental aid, global health and basic science R & D — all major building blocks of the last philanthropic wave.
But plenty of that new money is likely to be spent on causes that probably strike many Americans as pretty strange, too — a set of causes clustered around A.I. safety but spreading out into longstanding E.A. concerns ranging from animal welfare to “existential risk.” The OpenAI Foundation may gain more than $200 billion from the company’s I.P.O., and it lists as one of its two causes managing the future and safety of A.I., the very technology from which the world-shaping wealth of the foundation derives. This commitment reflects a certain amount of humility and self-awareness, given widespread anxiety about A.I. But how many of those worrying over the impacts of A.I. would trust A.I. fortunes to steer the project to buffer its impacts? Would they have trusted the robber barons to direct the busting of the trusts?
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