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........

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