Tallinn warns AI could end humanity while awaiting billions from Anthropic IPO

Anthropic backer Tallinn plans to fund AI safety with IPO proceeds

Jaan Tallinn, one of Anthropic’s earliest investors, spent this past week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York warning policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors that AI could end humanity, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The 54-year-old Estonian-born investor who helped build Skype stands to make billions from Anthropic’s expected initial public offering, which Metaplanet managing partner Rauno Miljand said could top $2 trillion. Concerns about AI motivated Tallinn’s investment, according to the Journal.

On a February trip from an AI summit in New Delhi to an ethical AI conference in Paris, Tallinn chartered a jet for a group that included AI researchers Stuart Russell and Yoshua Bengio and a classical pianist named Serene. They debated machine consciousness at 40,000 feet over flutes of champagne.

“Unfortunately, I believe we are not taking this threat seriously enough and that we are racing to build a technology that could end humanity,” Tallinn said in a statement reported by the Journal. “If more people demand the right to understand the risk and speak up about the risks of recklessly developing this technology, then we and our children will all stand a better chance of surviving.”

Tallinn’s strategy, according to friends and colleagues cited by the Journal, rests on a counterfactual: if he did not invest in Anthropic, an investor unconcerned with safety would have taken his place. He has said he believes he can have the most positive impact by investing in AI companies and directing the returns toward nonprofits that support AI safety work.

“All good, talented engineers who are mindful of that risk basically have a decision to make,” Miljand told the Journal. “Run to the shelter and try to spend as much time with loved ones, or to try to impact the process and steer the probabilities that humanity will survive.”

The AI-safety community remains divided over whether working at or investing in AI companies advances safety or fuels the very race it aims to slow. Some argue that independent safety research, funded outside the labs, offers a cleaner path.

Tallinn’s case for AI safety — which he has been making for over a decade — spilled into public view in recent weeks when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that AI could spin out of control, the Journal reported. Tallinn said he shares those concerns. His stated fears include the race between AI labs, the U.S.-China rivalry and AI’s growing ability to improve itself. He has imagined apocalyptic scenarios in which AI data centers acquire land once used for agriculture, causing mass starvation, or in which AI engineers alter Earth’s atmosphere, making it inhospitable to humans.

Tallinn, ranked Estonia’s wealthiest person by local media with an estimated $12 billion fortune, has funded AI safety initiatives with about $170 million, according to a list he published of his donations. He co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute.

Born behind the Iron Curtain in Estonia — a small Baltic country with a tech hub that the Journal said “punches above its weight” — Tallinn earned a theoretical physics degree and helped build the file-sharing application Kazaa, then Skype, which Microsoft acquired for $8.5 billion in the early 2000s. His parents were an architect and a film director. He first accessed a computer at age 14.

In 2008, while searching for his next project, he encountered the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leader of the rationalist community known for his prolific writing on AI alignment. Yudkowsky is also known for his 660,000-word fan fiction “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” and a recent book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” After debating Yudkowsky, Tallinn said he became fully convinced of AI’s catastrophic potential. Tallinn became a major donor to Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute and to effective altruist groups including the Centre for Effective Altruism.

In 2011, during a phone call with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of the charity evaluator GiveWell, and Dario Amodei — then working with the organization and later to co-found Anthropic — Tallinn offered a bleak forecast recorded in a transcript published by Coefficient Giving, which grew out of GiveWell.

“I estimate the probability of us dying from an AGI disaster in double digits,” he said, according to the transcript. “To me it’s as though we are trying to defuse a bomb.”

Amodei, less certain, responded: “The way I think about it, there may or may not be a bomb. Maybe the actions we associate with defusing the bomb are the ones most likely to set off the bomb.”

Although they disagreed, Amodei and Tallinn stayed in touch. Tallinn was an early backer of DeepMind and served on its board before Google’s 2014 acquisition. He did not convince DeepMind’s founders to prioritize his concerns, according to Sebastian Mallaby, author of “The Infinity Machine,” a book on DeepMind.

“In the case of DeepMind, the founders really didn’t want to listen to him and didn’t,” Mallaby said. “He didn’t succeed in having any influence.”

DeepMind’s success earned Tallinn clout. Over time, the scope of Metaplanet’s investments expanded and now includes SpaceXAI, the Boring Company and smart ring company Oura, which is also planning an IPO. He cemented a reputation among friends and fellow investors as someone who would voice his concerns often and openly, including with those who didn’t share them.

In 2021, after Amodei and others left OpenAI in part over safety concerns to start Anthropic, Tallinn led a $124 million Series A round that also included Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave of Jane Street, the Center for Emerging Risk Research and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The round valued Anthropic at $461 million, according to data firm PitchBook. Traditional venture capital firms largely did not participate, viewing Anthropic as a David to OpenAI’s Goliath.

Tallinn acknowledged on the Manifold podcast this year that individual stakeholders had “less and less voice” as Anthropic grew. Miljand told the Journal he is working on how to use proceeds from the anticipated IPO in support of humanity.

And if Anthropic does not succeed, Miljand said, there will still be reason to celebrate.

“If it turns out that Anthropic fails and goes to zero, then that’s a good thing because then we probably didn’t reach ASI and humanity just bought itself additional years,” Miljand said, referring to artificial superintelligence. “It’s kind of a win-win.”

The Journal, which described Tallinn as “surprisingly upbeat” despite his apocalyptic fears, reported that he takes solace in movies — the Richard Linklater romance “Before Sunset” is among his favorites — hip-hop dancing and learning Japanese. He trains regularly with a dance instructor and practices freestyle dancing from San Francisco to his favorite city, Tokyo.

Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh, a Cambridge University AI researcher and friend, told the Journal: “He literally goes dancing, sleeps for four or five hours, comes in and gives a talk at [charitable organization] The Elders, goes home, takes a nap and then does some meetings over dinner. If this stuff wasn’t going on, he would spend all of his time dancing and coding.”

The article appeared in the September 26, 2026, print edition of The Wall Street Journal as “He’s About to Make Billions Off the Tech He Fears.” Kate Clark covers startups, venture capital and artificial intelligence for the Journal. A Seattle native, she earned her degree from the University of Washington.