Rob Reich

Rob Reich spent the first half of his career excavating the political structure concealed beneath the surface of charitable giving. In Just Giving, he showed that philanthropy—almost universally regarded as virtuous—is an exercise of power that operates outside democratic accountability: the philanthropist directs resources according to values she chose, toward purposes she defined, through mechanisms subsidized by the public treasury but accountable to no public body. The insight was controversial when applied to the Ford Foundation. Applied to Anthropic and OpenAI, it becomes incendiary. The AI company that releases a powerful model at low cost occupies the same institutional position as the philanthropist who endows a public library: it has processed a shared resource—the accumulated knowledge of human civilization, produced on publicly funded infrastructure—and distributes the result on terms it sets, for purposes it defines, without accountability to the public whose commons it enclosed. What Reich insists upon, with the patience of a political philosopher who has heard every counter-argument, is that effectiveness is