The AI Billionaire Giving Away His Entire Fortune—And The Unresolved Questions Facing Tech’s New Philanthropy Wave

David Silver is a billionaire in every sense but one: he will never collect a cent of his fortune. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence, the artificial intelligence lab he founded, is valued at an astronomical sum, but he structured the company that way on purpose.

Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind, where he specialized in reinforcement learning—an AI training method that teaches models through positive and negative feedback loops. In 2016, he led the team that built AlphaGo, the first AI to defeat a top human Go champion, a breakthrough hailed as the first working example of narrow artificial superintelligence. Silver left DeepMind to launch Ineffable Intelligence in January, betting that new breakthroughs in reinforcement learning will close the gap between human and machine cognition across all domains.

At launch, Silver raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation, reportedly the largest seed funding round in European tech history. He also made a non-negotiable vow: he will donate every dollar he earns from any future sale of his company stake to charity.

“I thought very deeply about what I could do to create maximum impact on the world,” Silver told WIRED during an interview at his Kings Cross, London office, just around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not just through the AI work I do, but through the wealth that work generates along the way.” He will decide how to allocate the funds after selling his stake, he says, but his core goal is to save as many lives as possible.

Silver is the most high-profile recent addition to a growing group of AI founders who have pledged their equity proceeds to charity. Other notable names include DeepMind co-founder and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, and Anton Osika, founder of automated coding platform Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic follow through on their planned public offerings—expected to create thousands of new millionaires in the process—the AI industry could soon make up an outsize share of all global tech philanthropy.

But alongside this new generation of techno-philanthropists comes a web of thorny, unresolved questions: Is private philanthropy the most appropriate way to redistribute massive concentrations of wealth? To what degree are megadonors themselves responsible for many of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that grows in value with a company’s success be used to justify unethical business practices or reckless, speed-over-safety AI accelerationism? And how is this wave different from previous eras of Silicon Valley giving?

“You can’t rely on capitalism to solve many of the problems created by capitalist practices themselves … the growth of extreme wealth concentration and massive systemic inequality,” says Linsey McGoey, sociology professor at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “It’s like calling on the arsonist to hose down the house he just set on fire.”

Silver formalized his charitable commitment through Founders Pledge, a non-profit that helps entrepreneurs commit to giving away their wealth. Unlike the better-known Giving Pledge, which is a public but non-binding promise, Founders Pledge requires participants to sign a legally binding contract. “The choice of making a binding pledge was very important to me,” Silver says.

Founded in 2015, Founders Pledge has seen pledges skyrocket in recent years, jumping from $400 million in total pledges in 2023 to $4 billion so far in 2024. The AI industry now accounts for one-third of all lifetime pledges the non-profit has recorded. The organization’s goal, according to co-founder David Goldberg, is to identify “the very best ways to deploy capital at scale to make the world better.”

Founders Pledge is often linked to the effective altruism movement, which encourages people to build wealth in order to give it away, prioritizes data over emotional decision-making, and often focuses on far-future global risks over immediate needs. But Goldberg pushes back on that comparison; Founders Pledge centers on reducing human suffering in the present. “We’re far more humanist,” he says.

Silver describes himself as an effective altruist, but says his “flavor is about the here and now.” He plans to direct his pledge proceeds to proven charities like the Malaria Foundation, which can save the greatest number of lives in the near 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 says.

Osika, the Lovable founder who has pledged to give away half of his equity proceeds, does not identify as an effective altruist, but he shares the core belief that building wealth through successful business 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,” he tells WIRED.

The new wave of AI philanthropists follows a path blazed by earlier tech giving legends. The Gates Foundation, the most famous example of modern tech philanthropy, has given away more than $100 billion to fight poverty and disease in the 25 years since Bill and Melinda Gates founded it. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged to donate their $200 billion fortune to scientific research through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Both have been held up as shining examples of how an entrepreneurial mindset can translate to effective philanthropy, and how the profit motive can be harnessed for public good. The new generation of AI philanthropists aims to carry that legacy forward into a world they expect will be completely reorganized by superintelligence. “For a very long time, it’s been clear to me that this technological transformation is going to be the biggest thing that happens in our lifetimes,” Osika says.

However, this model of giving comes with major trade-offs, and can allow megadonors to quietly advance their own political interests, McGoey says. A recent study found that reliance on philanthropic funding led the World Health Organization (WHO) to prioritize donors’ preferred causes at the expense of other urgent issues, like non-communicable diseases. McGoey argues that donations that only ease the symptoms of inequality, rather than attacking its root causes, often end debates about long-term systemic change before they even begin. “It’s appealing to the perpetuator of a problem to resolve it—and that doesn’t necessarily lead to positive results,” she says. “I don’t think that people should kid themselves that making money on its own is somehow noble.”

The WHO has acknowledged flaws in its funding model, and released a new framework in 2022 to address many of these concerns. Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, has also recognized the pitfalls of relying on private megadonors. “It’s not right for a private philanthropy to be one of the largest funders of multinational global health efforts,” he said in 2023, noting the Gates Foundation is the WHO’s second-largest donor. But he blamed shrinking government contributions for the imbalance, adding: “I’d love it if many more governments would pass us on that list.”

Megadonors can play a valuable role funding causes neglected by governments for ideological reasons, like family planning. But they are not held to the same public accountability as elected institutions, says Apolline Taillandier, a University of Cambridge researcher specializing in political theory. “These funders are not elected. They have no need to account for their decisions,” she says. “It comes down to the question of whether philanthropy is the most legitimate way of redistributing resources.”

There is an additional risk that entrepreneurs may use their philanthropic ambition as moral justification for harmful or reckless behavior. In 2024, one-time crypto kingpin and effective altruism poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. At trial, a former colleague testified that Bankman-Fried based all his decisions on cold statistical analysis, and was willing to risk disaster if it meant a shot at a sufficiently large positive end result. While EA leaders disavowed Bankman-Fried, many critics frame his fraud as a symptom of the movement’s flawed moral logic.

In the context of AI, the core concern is that a charitable pledge could become part of a dangerous risk calculation. By the same “Bankman-Friedian logic,” a headlong rush to develop superintelligence could be justified, no matter the potential harms, if the wealth it generates creates enough philanthropic good.

Silver denies that his pledge acts as a form of moral offset for the risks of the AI race, or a hedge against potential negative outcomes of fast AI development. He believes superintelligence will have a radically positive impact on the world, endlessly generating new knowledge through recursive cycles of trial and error. Far from justifying reckless accelerationism, Silver argues, his pledge eliminates the personal financial incentives that can corrupt AI development.

“Building a superintelligence company is a huge responsibility to the planet, and that responsibility shouldn’t be led by personal greed,” says Silver. “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 acknowledges he benefits from an economic system stacked in favor of people like him. But giving his fortune away is one of the most meaningful ways he can redress that imbalance, he argues. “Individuals that choose to use their money for good will have a massive, transformative difference on the future of the world we live in,” he says. “That’s independent of whether the macroeconomic situation is the right thing for humanity. It’s just a fact.”