David Silver, founder of the AI lab Ineffable Intelligence, has pledged to donate all money from any future sale of his company to charity. Silver, a former Google DeepMind researcher who led the development of AlphaGo in 2016, raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation for his lab, reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history. He formalized his commitment through Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that requires participants to enter into a binding agreement, unlike the Giving Pledge. Silver is the latest in a growing line of AI founders to pledge equity proceeds to charity, including Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind cofounder and CEO of AI at Microsoft, and Anton Osika, founder of Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, the AI industry could represent an increasingly outsize proportion of tech philanthropy. However, this trend raises unresolved questions about whether philanthropy is the most appropriate way to redistribute wealth, the responsibility of megadonors for problems they aim to fix, and whether pledges could justify unsavory business practices. Linsey McGoey, professor of sociology at the University of Essex, compared the situation to "calling upon the arsonist to hose down the house he’s just set on fire."