SAN FRANCISCO — ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its rivals in artificial intelligence have promised investors immense profits while also warning that their technology will disrupt society by automating jobs and creating new national security threats.
Now those same companies are directing hundreds of billions of dollars toward charitable projects that will attempt to soften the blow.
Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude, said Sunday that it would donate 5 percent of the company to a new fund to benefit the public. It may be used to address AI’s destabilizing impact on workers, the company said, including payments “to specific populations.” If the company is valued at $2 trillion when it lists on the stock market this year, as some analysts expect, the fund will be endowed with $100 billion. Anthropic’s seven founders — all set to become multibillionaires — have separately said they will donate 80 percent of their wealth to charitable causes.
The day after Anthropic’s commitment, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that he plans to give “one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” next year and donate more in the future. President Donald Trump later said that the shares will be distributed through Trump Accounts, which have enrolled 70 million children since the program launched in July. At SpaceX’s share price late Wednesday, Musk’s contributions could total more than $11 billion.
Combined with OpenAI’s philanthropic foundation, which the company has said owns about a quarter of the company, the money set aside by the three AI firms could represent nearly $300 billion of philanthropic capital — more than three times as much as the influential Gates Foundation run by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
The massive commitments could make the AI companies influential far beyond their business interests. Gates and fellow billionaires George Soros and Charles and David Koch caused major shifts in global health and climate policy, and U.S. politics, with much smaller amounts than the AI companies have on tap.
Anthropic has said its new fund won’t make political donations, and as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, OpenAI’s foundation is not able to make them.
Anthropic, and OpenAI’s foundation, have already backed projects working on new treatments for respiratory disease and Alzheimer’s. But they have not released detailed plans for their huge philanthropic funds.
All three AI firms have discussed using their philanthropy in ways that could offset the inequality they predict their technology may cause, or share the wealth created by AI more broadly.
OpenAI’s foundation identifies the effect of AI on jobs and the economy as one of its core focus areas and in May allocated $250 million to studying it. Anthropic previously set aside $200 million to fund research into the impact of AI on jobs and said its fund announced this week that it will pursue the same issue with “bolder approaches.”
Musk’s weekend announcement that he would donate stock to the public follows his previous claims that AI would create such economic abundance that the government could send out checks that create “universal high income.”
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, said the latest philanthropic proposals from AI giants are a sign of “the big disconnect between how industry leaders view the potential effects of AI and how regular people do.” Recent surveys show that Americans want real work to do, not live on handouts, he said.
“I don’t think ‘automate and compensate’ is going to be the way forward,” Narayanan said.
A spokesperson for the OpenAI Foundation said its mission is to benefit people through the use of AI and help “society prepare for and become resilient to new challenges as AI advances.” The organization has distributed $855 million since March 2026, the spokesperson said. OpenAI said in February that the foundation’s stake in the company was worth more than $180 billion. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Anthropic did not have comment.
Sam Manning, a senior research fellow at the nonprofit GovAI, a think tank dedicated to AI governance, said the companies alone are unlikely to be able to mitigate disruption from their technology.
“The main lever that needs to be pulled to help make this all go well in the U.S. is going to be at the federal policy and state policy levels, and that is not something you can just pay for with philanthropic money,” said Manning, who previously studied the economic implications of AI as a contractor for OpenAI.
Giving money also cannot address some of the most significant effects of AI able to displace humans from jobs, he said. Workers whose careers are drastically changed by smarter machines may suffer from a loss of identity, not just income, Manning said.
Critics of the AI industry have argued that the charitable pledges amount to a marketing campaign aiming to win goodwill for a technology that is broadly unpopular with the public. Majorities of Americans believe AI will destroy many jobs and is bad for society, a Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Wednesday found.
At the same time, private-sector giveaways like Musk’s stock pledge are genuinely exciting to many people struggling in today’s economy, said Linsey McGoey, a sociology professor at the University of Essex in Britain.
“Investment accounts like Robin Hood are popular for a reason,” she said. “Rather than chastising voters for this, those of us who want a fairer economy need to harness and redistribute market power in novel ways.”
Gene Sperling, an economist who oversaw the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan during the Biden administration and founded Georgetown University’s Economic Dignity Lab, said that giving stock to members of the public has limitations.
The value isn’t accessible unless the stock is sold. And mass donations of stock could “buy off public support” for a company, Sperling said, potentially undermining attempts to introduce sensible regulation that could affect a firm’s business.
Regardless of what form their donations take, the AI firms have pledged to give enough to have a major impact in the world.
Brian Galle, a professor of law at UC Berkeley Law who focuses on taxation and nonprofit organizations, said the AI companies could have a significant positive impact if they spend in a focused way.
He compared the potential to how the Ford Foundation’s spending on agricultural research in the 1960s helped create more productive crops for developing nations. “They were able to leverage that into a program that prevented billions of people from starving over the long run,” Galle said.
Anthropic and OpenAI could do something similar for the world if they choose, he said. “It gives the funders a chance to really get to scale on a problem of their choice in a way that almost no one ever gets to do.”
One approach the AI companies could take would be to fill the humanitarian gaps left by the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service, the group previously overseen by Musk, Galle said. Doing so would probably offer “very high social return for the money,” he said.
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