AI employees are becoming major political donors
Their donations suggest misgivings about where the AI industry is taking us
I firmly believe that almost everyone who works for the big AI companies means well.
Unfortunately, meaning well and doing good aren’t the same thing. Through rationalization, self-interest has a way of hijacking good intentions.
I’m not just talking about the mind-altering effects of seven-to-nine-figure compensation packages, because self-interest is not purely monetary. Some people at these companies are chasing their curiosity. Others just want to keep doing what they’re good at, or be at the center of something important. But for many, I suspect the strongest incentives are social: if you’ve been “locked in” at your company, developing AI for years, the industry might be your whole world. Your friends, your professional prestige, and your sense of self-worth might all be tied up with group beliefs about superintelligence being both inevitable and too powerful to leave to some other group.
I imagine the difficulty of breaking away from that world is not unlike the difficulty of leaving a socially consuming religion (a matter to which I can speak from personal experience).
This is how I reconcile the seeming contradiction in the political expressions we see from these employees. The San Francisco Standard is the latest to report that AI workers benefiting from recent or expected IPOs and investment rounds are making sizable political donations to candidates and super PACs pushing for stronger regulation of the AI industry.
The contribution rate is described as unusual:
Political giving used to be rare among (notoriously apolitical) tech workers, but it is much more widespread at AI companies, particularly Anthropic. Roughly 59 of every 1,000 Anthropic employees have donated to a federal campaign this cycle — almost triple the rate of Airbnb’s employees during their first post-IPO cycle, and five to six times that of Facebook and Google. OpenAI’s donor participation rate is lower but still above Google, Facebook, and Airbnb’s post-IPO cohorts.
As always, you can find a cynical read: Maybe these donors are hoping to influence the regulators before the regulators can influence them. But I don’t buy it. That sort of play requires high-level coordination, which appears absent. Individuals’ donations are in many cases directly countering anti-regulation donations by a smaller number of high-profile figures at their own companies, like those of OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman.
There’s a non-cynical explanation. The article — reasonably, I think — credits the higher donation rate of AI tech workers to the norms of Effective Altruism, a charitable philosophy popular among many who went to work for these companies. Effective Altruism endorses “earning to give” strategies where a talented individual might go to work in a high-paying field so as to be able to donate large sums to causes expected to do far more good with that money than any harms incidental to the earning of it.
So I suspect many AI employees now donating large sums to AI safety politics see themselves as sticking to their principles while they try to positively influence their companies — about which they have serious misgivings — from the inside. Some of their therapists confirm this, according to an article I covered in April.
To be fair, I personally assign a single-digit percent probability to the conscientious insider strategy being correct — about as high as the probability the people following that strategy often assign to superintelligence ending humanity.
But my colleague Alana recently shared why trying to do good from inside the AI labs looks fatally flawed: On Thursday, she discussed a blog post by ex-Google DeepMind employee Alex Turner about how the people at these companies have already shown time and again that when push comes to shove, they ignore the red lines they have set for themselves.
Humility is admitting that your courage can fail, and that your moral compass can be bent. Wisdom is getting out of a morally corrosive environment while you still can. The AI safety donations leaking out of the industry machine tell me that parts of the machine mean well. But a cog that squeals in protest is still a cog.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.