Bill Gates, Charles Koch, et al. Are Giving $1 Billion To Boost Economic Mobility Using A.I. (Link-Post)

By Jordan Arel @ 2025-07-19T21:37 (+11)

For link-post click here.

Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Steve Ballmer, Scott Cook, and John Overdeck are partnering with Anthropic to donate/invest in ventures aimed at using AI to boost economic mobility.

This is great to see.

While this is targeting the US, it would be really interesting to see if any of the interventions are easily replicable in low and middle income countries – I would assume since they use AI, some of them might be easy to copy.

A few quotes:

“On Thursday, the charitable foundations of billionaires Bill Gates (net worth: $116.9 billion), Charles Koch ($67.5 billion), Steve Ballmer ($142.5 billion), Intuit founder Scott Cook ($7.7 billion) and hedge fund investor John Overdeck ($7.4 billion) announced a more than $1 billion pledge to fund a new philanthropic vehicle focused on economic mobility called NextLadder Ventures. That entity will partner with artificial intelligence giant Anthropic and will support organizations focused on using AI and other emerging technologies to improve the financial trajectory of low-income Americans.”

“NextLadder Ventures plans to add new philanthropic partners and raise additional funding over 15 years. But it also hopes to inspire other public and private funding sources to help build a market of increasingly scalable technologies that help low-income Americans, social workers, legal aid attorneys and other essential service providers overcome the biggest economic obstacles they face. Among them: job loss, housing instability, childcare, health crises and expungement of criminal records.”

“Anthropic will provide AI processing power and technical assistance at no cost to the beneficiaries of NextLadder Ventures’ funding to help them innovate and bring their technological solutions to market faster.”

NickLaing @ 2025-07-20T07:15 (+7)

I've got mixed feelings about this for a couple of reasons. 

  1. It's a lot of money committed without a clear target. This might be partly because the article did a poor job of explaining what the money is actually for, but the only concrete example I understood was

     "for-profit startup Rasa-Legal, whose technology helps its customers expunge their criminal records for nearly a tenth of the typical cost." Which does seem pretty great!

  2. There's probably more need for this kind of AI powered mobility in low income countries. For example if there was a similar tool like that Rasa-legal one above here in Uganda, it would have big potential for impact.