An article published in WIRED by journalist Joel Khalili reveals a growing trend among a new generation of artificial intelligence entrepreneurs who are preparing to give away their vast wealth to charity. The most prominent case is that of David Silver, founder of the AI research lab Ineffable Intelligence, whose paper wealth reaches astronomical proportions, though he himself does not plan to collect a single penny of it. Silver has decided to donate all future proceeds from any sale of his company to charity, as part of a philanthropic wave connecting the emerging artificial intelligence industry with piercing questions about wealth concentration, political influence, and social responsibility.
David Silver: From the AlphaGo Breakthrough to Ineffable Intelligence
David Silver is not a new face in the world of artificial intelligence. Between 2013 and 2025, he worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind, where he specialized in reinforcement learning—a method of training models through positive and negative feedback. In 2016, Silver led the development of AlphaGo, which became the first AI system to defeat a human champion in the highly complex board game "Go." This achievement was heralded at the time as a breakthrough and a narrow form of superintelligence.
In January, Silver left DeepMind to establish Ineffable Intelligence, driven by the belief that breakthroughs in reinforcement learning will bridge the gap between human and machine cognition across the board. Upon founding the company, Silver succeeded in raising an unprecedented $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation—reportedly the largest seed funding round in European history. However, alongside this rapid financial success, Silver announced that he is committing to donate all funds he receives from any future sale of his company to charity. In an interview conducted at his office in the Kings Cross area of London, near the DeepMind headquarters, Silver explained the motivation behind the decision: "I was thinking very deeply about what I could do to have the maximum impact on the world. Not just through the work I do, but through the finance I arrive at in the process." Silver will choose how to allocate the funds after he sells his company, but his ambition is to save as many human lives as possible.
Silver is not alone in this trend. Other founders in the AI sector have committed to transferring their equity proceeds to charity. Among them are Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft's AI division, and Anton Osika, founder of the automated coding platform Lovable. If leading companies like OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, they could mint thousands of new millionaires, and the artificial intelligence industry may capture a highly significant share of global tech philanthropy.
From Non-Binding Promises to Legal Contracts: The Role of Founders Pledge
Silver formalized his philanthropic commitment through a non-profit organization called Founders Pledge, which assists entrepreneurs in donating their wealth. Unlike the famous Giving Pledge, which is based on a public but legally non-binding promise, Founders Pledge requires its participants to sign a legally binding contract. "The choice of making a binding pledge was very important," Silver emphasized.
Founders Pledge has been active since 2015, but the value of commitments recorded by the organization has recently surged dramatically: from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion during the current year (2026). Currently, the artificial intelligence industry represents approximately one-third of the total historical pledges recorded by the organization. According to the organization's co-founder, David Goldberg, the goal is to "identify the very best ways to deploy capital at scale to make the world better."
The organization's activities are frequently linked to the Effective Altruism movement, which encourages individuals to accumulate wealth with the explicit goal of donating it, relying on statistical data rather than emotion, and prioritizing causes that will have the greatest impact on humanity’s distant future. However, Goldberg distances himself from a direct comparison, emphasizing that Founders Pledge focuses on present human suffering: "We're far more humanist," he explained.
Silver also considers himself part of the Effective Altruism movement but defines his approach as focusing on the "here and now." Consequently, he plans to direct his donation funds to organizations such as the Malaria Foundation, which are capable of saving the greatest number of lives in the immediate 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 said.
On the other hand, Anton Osika of Lovable, who has committed to donating half of his equity proceeds, does not identify as an effective altruist but shares the belief that accumulating wealth through business success is the best way for him to maximize his positive 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]," Osika noted.
Structural Critiques of Big Tech Philanthropy
The generous promises of the new generation of founders occur against the backdrop of a vast philanthropic legacy from previous tech giants. The Gates Foundation—the most famous embodiment of tech philanthropy—has donated over $100 billion to eradicate poverty and disease in the 25 years since it was established by Bill and Melinda Gates. Similarly, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, promised to donate their fortune, estimated at $200 billion, to scientific research through their foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Both are considered prominent examples of how an entrepreneurial mindset and a profit motive can translate into effective philanthropy.
However, this type of philanthropy also draws fierce criticism. Professor Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift, argues that capitalism cannot be relied upon to solve the very problems created by capitalist practices themselves, such as the deepening of extreme wealth concentration and inequality. "It's like calling upon the arsonist to hose down the house he's just set on fire," she emphasizes.
McGoey adds that donations designed to alleviate problems arising from economic inequality, rather than addressing the root cause, risk halting public debate on long-term systemic remedies before it even begins. Furthermore, such philanthropy can be used by wealthy elites to discreetly advance their political interests. A recent study found that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) reliance on philanthropic funding led it to prioritize donors' preferred goals at the expense of other urgent issues, such as non-communicable diseases. The WHO acknowledged its financing issues and introduced a new model in 2022 designed to address these concerns.
Apolline Taillandier, a political theory researcher at the University of Cambridge, points to the lack of democratic legitimacy of mega-donors: "These funders are not elected. They have no need to account for their decisions. The central question is whether philanthropy is the most legitimate way of redistributing resources."
The CEO of the Gates Foundation, Mark Suzman, also acknowledged this complexity in 2023, noting that it is not right for a private philanthropic entity to be one of the largest funders of multilateral global health efforts. However, Suzman placed the blame on declining government contributions, stating he would be glad if more governments surpassed the foundation on the donor list. Conversely, mega-donors play an important role in funding causes that governments tend to neglect for ideological reasons, such as family planning.
The Danger of Moral Justification: Does Donating Absolve Destructive Behavior?
One of the central concerns accompanying the current wave of donations is the potential use of philanthropic promises as a tool for the moral justification of irresponsible business conduct or the reckless acceleration of technological development (accelerationism).
The most prominent example of this concern is the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former "crypto king" and public poster child of the Effective Altruism movement. In 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. During his trial, a former colleague testified that Bankman-Fried based all of his decisions on cold statistical analysis, gladly risking absolute disaster as long as there was a small chance of a sufficiently positive end result. Although the leaders of the Effective Altruism movement subsequently distanced themselves from him and defined him as an apostate of the movement's values, many critics argue that his fraud was a direct symptom of the movement's flawed moral logic.
In the context of artificial intelligence, there is a concern that entrepreneurs will view charitable pledges as a moral justification to continue the race toward superintelligence without regard for potential catastrophic consequences. According to Bankman-Friedian logic, the headlong pursuit of superintelligence would be justified simply because the wealth it generates will be used for massive philanthropic goals that offset the harm.
David Silver completely rejects the claim that his pledge is a form of "moral accounting" or a hedge against the negative consequences of the AI race. He genuinely believes that superintelligence will have a radically positive impact on the world by discovering new knowledge through an infinite recursive cycle of trial and error. According to Silver, the commitment to donate his profits actually eliminates the personal financial incentive that could 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," Silver argues. "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 admits that he is the beneficiary of an economic system stacked in his favor, but in his view, one of the few ways available to him to redress this imbalance is to give his money away: "Individuals who choose to use their money for good will make a massive, transformative difference to the future of the world we live in. That's completely independent of whether the current macroeconomic situation is the right thing for humanity. It's just a fact."