Fortunes from AI revive effective altruism after Sam Bankman-Fried turmoil
ft.com
ft.com
The EA folks are at it again
> The FT has identified more than 60 current and former Anthropic employees who have pledged on the “Giving What We Can” platform to donate at least 10 per cent of their income, reflecting effective altruism’s emphasis on using evidence and data to maximise the impact of philanthropy. Anthropic’s seven co-founders, who each have an estimated worth of about $8bn, have separately pledged to give away 80 per cent of their wealth, creating the prospect of billions of dollars in future donations.
> The prospect of new AI-created wealth is breathing new life into a movement that was forced into a reckoning after FTX’s former chief Bankman-Fried — one of EA’s most prominent advocates — was convicted of fraud related to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange. The movement is already attracting record levels of funding. Donations to charities that Giving What We Can classifies as “effective giving” reached about $2bn in 2025 from 80,000 donors, up from $1.2bn a year earlier and less than $300mn in 2018.
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> Amy Schiller, author of The Price of Humanity, a book critical of the EA movement, wrote that: “The assumption is that maximising life, and subsequently human utility, is so important that it trumps all other priorities,” such as beauty and human flourishing....The movement has also attracted criticism for championing “longtermism”, popularised by EA co-founder Will MacAskill, which argues that the interests of future generations are a key moral priority.