Nikolas Sargeant
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly stated he is no longer closely aligned with the Future of Life Institute (FLI), the nonprofit that received Shiba Inu tokens from him in 2021, a donation that ultimately yielded around $500 million after the institute cashed out its holdings.
Buterin explained that when he made the donation, FLI had pitched him a broad strategy for reducing existential risks across artificial intelligence, biology, and nuclear threats, alongside pro-peace and pro-epistemics initiatives. That vision, he said, motivated the contribution. However, he says the organization has since shifted toward cultural and political advocacy around AI risk, a direction he views as meaningfully different from what was originally proposed.
His concern centers on the risks of large-scale coordinated political action backed by significant funding, which he warned could produce unintended consequences, trigger backlashes, and result in solutions that are both authoritarian and brittle. He also took issue with FLI's focus on placing restrictions directly into biosynthesis devices and AI models, describing that approach as fragile given how readily such safeguards can be circumvented through jailbreaking or fine-tuning.
On the scale of FLI's financial position, Buterin acknowledged he had not anticipated the SHIB donation growing to the size it did. He had assumed the market lacked the depth to support a large liquidation, expecting the institute to cash out somewhere between $10 and $25 million. Instead, FLI converted approximately $500 million from the tokens. FLI had announced a $25 million grants program in June 2021 supported by the donation.
Cointelegraph reached out to FLI for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
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