This content can't be displayed right now.
To view this embed, please accept targeting cookies. It's loaded from a third party and requires that permission to appear.
In 2022, Itsi Weinstock moved to the Bay Area to join a synthetic-cheese start-up. A machine-learning scientist from Sydney, he had long been passionate about animal welfare and hopeful about technology’s capacity to improve it. Fake cheese fit his vision of a better future: a leap forward in the possible instead of merely a fight to preserve the natural. But recently he has taken on a new job. A friend introduced Weinstock to Senterra — a nonprofit that advises the rich on how to spend their wealth on projects that move society away from factory farming — with a unique opportunity. “The job,” he told me over a vegan burrito, is to “go get the Anthropic money.”
In January, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a long essay about the potential societal fallout from AI, most commentators focused on his discussion of the risks of the new technology. But philanthropies like Senterra noticed an announcement buried within: Amodei and his six co-founders had pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth. If staffers promise to donate up to 25 percent of their shares, the company will match their donations. Anthropic’s latest valuation is $965 billion and Forbes estimates that each of its owners is worth $15.5 billion. That means over $86 billion could drop into charitable giving after the IPO — more than 250 times what the now-imprisoned investor, Sam Bankman-Fried, ever claimed to unleash and nearly 15 percent of all philanthropic giving in 2024.
