The origin story of one of many largest AI coverage conflict chests on this planet begins with a canine coin, a closet in Canada, and a 78-digit quantity.
In 2021, the creators of Shiba Inu despatched an enormous chunk of SHIB tokens to Vitalik Buterin’s pockets with out asking. The concept was easy. Put “Vitalik owns half our provide” within the advertising and marketing supplies and trip the affiliation to develop into the subsequent Dogecoin. The tokens rapidly ballooned in worth, reaching a e book worth of over $1 billion.
Buterin wished out. In a submit on X on Friday, he described scrambling to liquidate earlier than the bubble popped, together with calling his stepmother in Canada and asking her to enter his closet, learn out a 78-digit quantity, and add it to a different 78-digit quantity transcribed from a paper in his backpack.
He bought what he may for ETH and donated $50 million to GiveWell. However he was nonetheless sitting on a mountain of SHIB.
There are sometimes posts mentioning that I donated a really great amount of funds to @FLI_org years in the past and connecting me to varied coverage actions that they take. I believed I might clarify the report each on the character of my connection to them, and on similarities and variations…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 13, 2026
He break up the rest in half. One half went to CryptoRelief, which used half to fund medical infrastructure in India and half to assist Balvi, Buterin’s personal analysis initiative.
The opposite half went to the Way forward for Life Institute, a corporation centered on existential dangers from AI, biotech, and nuclear weapons. FLI had introduced him with a roadmap protecting all main danger classes, in addition to “pro-peace and pro-epistemics initiatives.”
Buterin anticipated FLI would money out $10 to $25 million, given how skinny SHIB’s liquidity was. As a substitute, they managed to liquidate roughly $500 million. CryptoRelief pulled off an analogous exit from its half, he stated.
A meme coin that no person took severely had simply created a billion-dollar philanthropy occasion, and half of it went to a corporation that will quickly pivot its whole technique.
That pivot is the rationale Buterin posted on Friday. He stated FLI underwent “an inside pivot by which they began specializing in cultural and political motion as a major methodology, fairly totally different from the unique strategy.”
FLI’s justification, in line with Buterin, is that AGI is advancing quickly, and the group wants to maneuver aggressively to counter the lobbying budgets of huge AI firms.
“My fear is that large-scale coordinated political motion with huge cash swimming pools is a factor that may simply result in unintended outcomes, trigger backlashes, and resolve issues in a method that’s each authoritarian and fragile, even when it was not initially supposed that method,” he wrote.
He pointed to FLI’s biosafety strategy for example. The group’s major technique has been to embed guardrails into AI fashions and bio-synthesis units in order that they refuse to create harmful outputs.
Buterin referred to as this “very fragile,” noting that jailbreaks, fine-tuning, and different workarounds make such restrictions straightforward to avoid. He warned that the logical endpoint of that strategy results in “let’s ban open-source AI” after which “let’s assist one good-guy AI firm to ascertain international dominance and do not let anybody else get to the identical degree.”
“Approaches like this VERY EASILY backfire: they make the remainder of the world your enemy,” he wrote.
He additionally flagged a structural drawback with regulation-first methods. When governments prohibit harmful expertise, nationwide safety organizations inevitably get exempted, and those self same organizations are sometimes a supply of the danger themselves. He cited authorities lab leak packages for example.
Nonetheless, Buterin stated he is been “heartened” by a few of FLI’s current work, particularly a “pro-human AI declaration” that he stated, “unites conservatives, progressives and libertarians, America, Europe and China.” He additionally famous FLI has been researching methods to keep away from the focus of energy from AI.
However the core message was clear. A donation Buterin by no means deliberate, from tokens he by no means wished, funded a corporation that pivoted away from the strategy he believed in, and is now deploying lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} in ways in which make him uncomfortable. He shared his considerations with FLI on “a number of events” earlier than going public.
FLI didn’t instantly reply to CoinDesk’s request for feedback on the donated quantity and AI security considerations.