The AI IPO windfall celebrated by the Journal is a charity-laundering operation that converts extraction into absolution. The numbers are supposed to awe us. A 26 percent stake in OpenAI held by a foundation, soon to be worth $180 billion—double the Gates Foundation’s endowment. A $380 billion valuation that, in a few months, surged to $965 billion, turning Anthropic’s seven founders into $39.2 billion philanthropists by pledge before they’ve cut a single check. Employees are being encouraged to donate shares to donor-advised funds. The donors get an immediate tax deduction. They avoid capital-gains taxes on the appreciation. The money grows tax-free inside the fund. And the fund has no obligation—none—to ever distribute a dollar to an actual operating charity.
The technical term for what is happening here is “donor-advised fund,” a tax receptacle that is to charity what a Cayman Islands trust is to citizenship: a place where money goes to enjoy a different set of rules than the ones that apply to you and me. An employee with a $10 million equity grant can donate shares to a DAF, avoid capital-gains tax on the appreciation, deduct the fair market value on their taxes, and then—here is the elegant part—do nothing. The fund has no annual distribution requirement. The money sits. It appreciates. It waits, nicely insulated from the estate tax that would otherwise apply to the millions the donor actually intends to give their children. The IRS collects nothing on the spread between what the employee paid and what the shares are worth. The deduction is not a match for what was contributed; it is a conversion of untaxed appreciation into a public subsidy of the donor’s chosen cause, sheltered from the tax code that was supposed to fund the public.
One donor-advised fund CEO calls it “not just billions, but potentially tens of billions” flowing into the charitable sector—“a triple win for taxes.” The first win is the deduction. The second is avoiding capital gains. The third is tax-free growth inside the fund. The school district that could have been funded by the tax revenue those write-offs displaced does not appear in the calculation. The Wall Street Journal calls this a “triple win” for taxes; the family sitting at the kitchen table whose child’s daycare costs more than their mortgage calls it something else, something less printable.
I sat at my kitchen table once and ran the math on what my family pays in federal taxes against what our school district receives back. The number does not reconcile. Now I am reading about a wealth event that will shelter hundreds of billions from the same tax code, and the people doing the sheltering are getting profiled as philanthropists. The same article notes that Anthropic “offered to quadruple any employee’s charitable contribution of their equity”—a company match that multiplies a donation fourfold, a corporate beneficence I have never seen extended to the nurse at the hospital my child was born in, or the teacher at the public elementary school where I am told my kid will get the same shot as everyone else.
Here is the math the philanthropy framing omits. Had a dollar of that newfound wealth been captured by the public—the same public whose tax-funded research and infrastructure built the semiconductor, the cloud, the internet, the very computing substrate these companies monetize—a dollar of it could have fixed the special-education funding shortfall that has forced every school district I know to cut reading tutors and occupational therapy. The federal government committed under IDEA to fund 40 percent of the excess cost of educating children with disabilities. For fifty years it has funded roughly a third of that promise, and the annual shortfall runs $24 billion. One foundation holding OpenAI equity could cover that gap for more than seven years. It has pledged one billion—less than three percent of a single year’s shortfall. Universal pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America would cost an estimated $30 to $40 billion a year. A fully refundable Child Tax Credit expansion runs about $100 billion annually. The foundation’s one-billion-dollar pledge is one-fortieth of one of those. The money sits in vehicles controlled by the people who created the wealth, distributed on the timeline they choose, with no public accountability and no obligation to the children whose schools are underfunded because the tax base that was supposed to support them was diverted into vehicles like this.
This is not a failure of philanthropy. This is what philanthropy does when the tax code is designed to let it.
Anne Helen Petersen wrote that millennials “became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes”—human capital optimized for a labor market that was supposed to reward the optimization. The AI companies being celebrated in the giving columns are building technology designed to replace the workers who made them valuable. The employees donating shares are optimizing their tax exposure in a system that extracts their labor and shelters the gains. The optimization is rational. The system it operates inside was not built to optimize for them.
Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO whose company is now worth nearly a trillion dollars, writes that those “at the forefront of AI’s economic boom should be willing to give away both their wealth and their power.” I want to pause for a moment on the word “power.” Dario Amodei has, through his equity in Anthropic, an economic interest in a technology that is being deployed to automate jobs, to concentrate control over the systems by which information is produced and priced, to transform the entire creative labor market into a series of services rendered by a model trained on uncompensated human work. That is not a lot of power to be giving away. That is the power to decide, from a boardroom, how many millions of people will no longer be able to make a living from the thing they went to graduate school to do. The 80 percent pledge is, from a certain angle, a promise to externalize the costs of the transformation and then, afterward, to be thought of as the kind of person who gave money to the things he broke. The sentence pre-positions a wealth-concentration event as a moral achievement. The giving is framed as voluntary—not as what a functioning tax code would have required automatically. The power is framed as something to be “given away” philanthropically, not as something that should never have been concentrated this way.
When a songwriter closes an album with a spoken dedication—a moment of thanks to the people who helped her build it—she is describing the work of an artist. When I read Amodei’s call to “give away both their wealth and their power,” I hear instead the language of indulgences—a transactional idea that a sin, once confessed and renumerated, is erased. The lapsed Catholicism my grandmother carried—the kind that gave up on Mass but never on feeding the hungry—worked in a different register. The corporal works of mercy—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless—were things the people did with their labor, not with the tax-deductible proceeds of a company that had never paid its fair share into the common purse. They were the opposite of a donor-advised fund with no distribution requirement. The tradition I was raised in names this differently: private property is legitimate, but it carries a social mortgage. Wealth that exceeds what a household needs bears an obligation that a tax-advantaged fund with no distribution requirement does not discharge. Leo XIII wrote that in 1891. The AI billionaires have not improved on the principle.
The effective altruism movement—the philosophical framework behind Silicon Valley’s giving culture—rebranded last year. It used to be called Open Philanthropy. Now it is Coefficient Giving. The change came after the movement’s most prominent figure went to prison for fraud. The name change did not alter the premise: that very wealthy people, armed with quantitative frameworks, are better positioned to decide where charitable money goes than public institutions accountable to voters. The premise is the one Andrew Carnegie ran in 1889: concentrate the wealth, then pose as its benevolent distributor. Carnegie and Rockefeller lived in an era before the income tax, before the Securities and Exchange Commission, before the modern administrative state had built the infrastructure that their own monopolies had made necessary. They gave away money because there was no system, in their lifetime, that would have compelled them to do otherwise. This new crop of billionaires lives inside a system that we, the generations who came before them and will live after, have decided should tax large accumulations of wealth and spend the proceeds on the public goods they claim to care about. Their “charity” is thus not a supplement to the state’s capacity to address climate change, education, and wealth inequality; it is a strategy for preempting that capacity altogether. It is, in the most important sense, an argument that you—the millennial mother whose household budget is being pinned to the wall by housing costs, student loans, and daycare—should not have a democratic say in the destination of the money, because the wealthy have already “committed” to give it away for you.
One of the article’s most quoted experts, a man whose fund processes the very equity these employees are donating, says that the coming decade will bring “not just billions, but potentially tens of billions” into the charitable sector. That is not a description of a windfall. It is a description of a fiscal transfer, of capital earned in the public’s channel being rerouted into private accounts controlled by people whose agenda is private, whose spending plans are unaudited, and whose idea of “systemic change” is the venture-capital thesis that a new generation of founders from the same dining clubs will try the same approach again. In the meantime, my household, like the households of the people who will lose their jobs to the very technology these “philanthropists” are building, will keep carrying the cost of public schools, public roads, and public health on a tax base hollowed out by the same deals that created the windfall in the first place.
The prior reporting has tracked how the same IPO wave will bind ordinary families’ retirement savings to the tech sector—your 401(k) is being wired to the same bubble creating these tax shelters. Record capital is flowing into the AI build-out; the philanthropy story is the finishing move: the wealth gets sheltered from the tax code, the revenue that would have funded your kid’s school disappears into a fund, and it gets called generosity.
Taylor Swift’s “You’re On Your Own, Kid” moves from a youth where the speaker waited for someone to arrive and make it work to an adulthood where she registered that no one was coming. The title line is the American care infrastructure’s mission statement. The friendship-bracelets line is the only safety net that materializes: other people in the same situation, holding each other up with their own hands, because the institutions that were supposed to do the holding have been optimized into donor-advised funds. “In my defense, I have none,” she sings in the folklore track that serves as the soundtrack to my own kitchen-table reckoning. My millennial peers, who have already learned that the meritocracy’s promises are a subscription service they cannot afford, have no defense either. We have only the math. The math says that the wealth being celebrated by the Journal is wealth we, collectively, paid to create, that it is being repriced as private charity, and that the price of that charity’s moral license is the permanent destruction of the public’s ability to demand anything else.
My daughter is four. My son is one. The foundation that holds $180 billion in OpenAI equity will distribute its returns to the causes its board selects. My children’s school will be funded by a property-tax base that has not kept pace and a federal government that has not kept its word. A functioning tax code would collect what is owed and spend it on what the country promised—fully funded special education, childcare families can afford, public schools that do not depend on a property-tax base that has not kept pace. Instead the code has been engineered to let the largest wealth-concentration event in a generation bypass the public entirely. The “triple win” is for the people who already won. That is not generosity. That is theft with a better logo.