The origin story of one of the biggest AI political crusaders in the world starts with a dog coin, a locker in Canada and a 78-digit number.
In 2021, the creators of Shiba Inu sent a massive chunk of SHIB tokens to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet without asking. The idea was simple. Put “Vitalik owns half of our supply” in the marketing material and ride the association to become the next Dogecoin. The tokens quickly increased in value, reaching a book value of over $1 billion.
Buterin wanted out. In a post on X Friday, he described trying to liquidate before the bubble burst, including calling his stepmother in Canada and asking her to go into his locker, read out a 78-digit number and add it to another 78-digit number that was transcribed from a paper in his backpack.
He sold what he could for ETH and donated $50 million to GiveWell. But he was still sitting on a mountain of SHIB.
There are often posts that mention that I donated a very large amount of funds to @FLI_org years ago and associate me with various political initiatives that they are taking. I thought I would set the record straight both about the nature of my connection to them and about the similarities and differences…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 13, 2026
He split the rest in half. One half went to CryptoRelief, which was partly used to finance medical infrastructure in India and partly to support Balvi, Buterin’s own research initiative.
The other half went to the Future of Life Institute, an organization focused on existential risks from artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nuclear weapons. The FLI had presented him with a roadmap covering all major risk categories, as well as “pro-peace and pro-epistemic initiatives.”
Buterin expected FLI to pay $10 to $25 million, given how thin SHIB’s cash flow was. Instead, they managed to liquidate about $500 million. CryptoRelief pulled a similar exit from its half, he said.
A meme coin that no one took seriously had just created a billion dollar philanthropy event, and half of it went to an organization that would soon pivot its entire strategy.
That pivot is why Buterin posted Friday. He said the FLI went through “an internal pivot where they began to focus on cultural and political action as a primary method, quite different from the original approach.”
FLI’s reasoning, according to Buterin, is that AGI is moving quickly and the organization needs to move aggressively to counter the lobbying budgets of large AI companies.
“My concern is that large-scale coordinated political action with large pools of money is something that can easily lead to unintended outcomes, cause backlash, and solve problems in a way that is both authoritarian and fragile, even if it was not originally intended,” he wrote.
He pointed to FLI’s biosecurity approach as an example. The organization’s primary strategy has been to embed guardrails into AI models and biosynthesis devices so that they refuse to create dangerous outputs.
Buterin called this “very fragile,” noting that jailbreaks, tweaks, and other workarounds make such restrictions easy to circumvent. He warned that the logical endpoint of this approach leads to “let’s ban open source AI” and then “let’s support a good AI company to establish global dominance and not let anyone else get to the same level.”
“Approaches like this backfire VERY EASILY: they make the rest of the world your enemy,” he wrote.
He also highlighted a structural problem with regulation-first strategies. When governments restrict dangerous technology, national security organizations are inevitably exempt, and those same organizations are often themselves a source of the risk. He cited the government’s laboratory leak programs as an example.
However, Buterin said he has been “encouraged” by some of FLI’s recent work, specifically a “pro-human AI statement” that he said “unites conservatives, progressives and libertarians, America, Europe and China.” He also noted that FLI has been researching ways to avoid the concentration of power from AI.
But the core message was clear. A donation Buterin never planned, from tokens he never wanted, funded an organization that veered away from the approach he believed in and is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars in ways that make him uncomfortable. He shared his concerns with the FLI on “several occasions” before going public.
FLI did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment on the amount donated and AI security issues.
