Last month, over 1,200 employees at OpenAI and Anthropic signed a statement urging the White House to please slow their respective companies down.

They are scared of what they’ve built.

Meanwhile, what they’ve built is about to make many of them very, very rich. And, when that happens, they’re likely to take matters into their own hands.

When the AI giants go public (which they’re planning to do over the next year), an ocean of equity pledged for philanthropic causes will become liquid. If these giants sell shares for prices north of their most recent valuations, we’re talking about well over $100 billion in philanthropic dry powder, equivalent to something like the giving of 10 Andrew Carnegies — spent much differently than historic norms.

“It’s not just a lot of money, but it’s a lot of money we can pretty much count on being used differently than it has in the past,” Brian Mittendorf, a nonprofit accounting specialist at Ohio State University, told me in an interview.

Traditionally, wealthy people often fund the arts and higher education; they might even set up foundations under their names to give money forever (Ford, Rockefeller). These new AI multimillionaires, however, are more likely to back organizations and causes popular within the “Effective Altruism” movement. This will likely mean turning to a small group of EA-aligned organizations — such as Coefficient Giving and Longview Philanthropy — that are about to become very powerful, very quickly.

The Turbulent History of Effective Altruism

While fairly well-known in tech circles, EA didn’t become broadly recognizable until the spectacular fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a crypto wonderboy and megadonor of charities and the DNC. After that, EA was declared lost — but today it is poised for a resurgence.