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AIPROPX ReportFortune · 1h ago
AI workers just got together and donated $40 million to save factory-farmed chickens
As AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic race toward IPO, they’re expected to create a new wave of millionaires and billionaires —and unleash billions of dollars in charitable giving. One of the major causes already attracting that wealth may come as a surprise: factory-farmed animals.
This year alone, donors tied to the AI industry have contributed roughly $40 million to efforts aimed at improving the lives of chickens, pigs, and other animals raised in industrial agriculture, according to Lewis Bollard, who has spent the past decade leading farm animal welfare work at Coefficient Giving .
“With the young AI crowd, there’s way more of a willingness to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll just sign a million-dollar check. Sure,” Bollard told Forbes .
Much of that momentum traces back to an appearance Bollard made on tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s show in August 2025. During the hour-long conversation, the pair argued that billions of animals endure lives of extreme confinement in industrial agriculture, yet the issue receives only a fraction of the philanthropic dollars devoted to causes such as climate change and global health.
“The way we treat factory-farmed animals is one of the worst atrocities in history,” Patel wrote on X last year . “And unfortunately, the problem is on track to get worse every year.”
The conversation quickly turned into action. Patel launched a fundraising campaign for FarmKind , a non-profit donation platform dedicated to ending factory farming.
Patel offered an initial $250,000 matching commitment, and it was fully claimed in less than two days—far faster than FarmKind expected, cofounder Thom Norman told Fortune . Patel and Bollard also began organizing informal dinners at AI companies, including OpenAI, to discuss factory farming and animal welfare with employees.
In total, Patel’s FarmKind campaign alone raised $2.3 million, Norman said, and repeat donors have since contributed another $200,000—and counting.
AI wealth could unleash $300 billion in new philanthropic giving
U.S. charitable giving reached a record $617.2 billion in 2025, according to the Giving USA Foundation. Yet the AI boom could dramatically reshape who is doing the giving. Forbes reported that roughly $300 billion in new wealth could flow into philanthropy over the next several years thanks to AI, eventually fueling about $30 billion in annual donations.
Unlike previous generations of wealthy donors, many younger founders, employees, and investors appear eager to give earlier in life rather than waiting until retirement or traditional estate-planning years.
The generosity extends beyond writing checks. According to a 2024 survey by Bank of America Private Bank of individuals with more than $3 million in investable assets, donors under 43 are slightly more likely to volunteer, twice as likely to help raise charitable donations from friends or peers, and more than four times as likely to act as mentors.
For animal welfare advocates, the influx of money and engagement, especially from Gen Z and millennial tech workers, is a potential turning point.
“The farmed animal movement has, historically, had less money to spend in a year globally than two weeks of McDonald’s profits,” Norman told Fortune . “So philanthropy from AI lab employees could be radically transformative.”
As young people reshape philanthropy, billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel question whether giving actually works
Despite the growing enthusiasm among younger wealthy donors, some of the world’s richest people have warned that philanthropy is far harder than simply writing a check.
Elon Musk , for example, has repeatedly argued that donating money effectively is one of the hardest problems facing wealthy individuals.
“The biggest challenge I find with my foundation is trying to give money away in a way that is truly beneficial to people,” Musk said on the WTF podcast last year. “It’s very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness. Very difficult.”
Musk has also said that money may become less important over the next decade as technology advances. When Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu challenged him to donate his fortune by 2036, Musk responded: “I am actually going to do something along these lines!”
Other tech billionaires have expressed similar doubts about traditional philanthropy. Peter Thiel , whose net worth is estimated at $27 billion, has said he has encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers —including Musk—to resend their commitment to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or upon death.
“Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he told The New York Times earlier this year, calling the Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
For nonprofit leaders, the difficulty is not necessarily finding worthy causes—it is ensuring that enormous sums of money actually create meaningful change.
“I wish I had a billion dollars to give away,” Liz Baker, CEO of global nonprofit Greater Good Charities, previously told Fortune . “But as somebody who’s responsible for giving away money, yeah, it’s hard, because there’s a really big responsibility that goes with that.”
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