--- alias: - Jaan Tallinn born: 1972-02-14 category: Technologists created: 2026-06-20 location: Tallinn, Estonia summary: Jaan Tallinn is the Estonian programmer who helped build Kazaa and Skype and turned the resulting fortune into the largest private funding stream for AI-safety and existential-risk work, cofounding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute and backing Anthropic and DeepMind. tags: - Person - JaanTallinn - ArtificialIntelligence - ExistentialRisk - EffectiveAltruism - Investor updated: 2026-06-20 --- Jaan Tallinn (born February 14, 1972) is an Estonian programmer and investor who was a founding engineer of the file-sharing application Kazaa and of Skype, and who used the wealth from those companies to become one of the largest private funders of work on existential risk and artificial-intelligence safety. He cofounded the [Centre for the Study of Existential Risk](/organizations/centre-for-the-study-of-existential-risk/) (2012) and the [Future of Life Institute](/organizations/future-of-life-institute/) (2014), is a longtime donor to the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/) and the [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/), was an early investor in DeepMind and led the 2021 Series A of [Anthropic](/organizations/anthropic/), and channels much of his giving through the [Survival and Flourishing Fund](/organizations/survival-and-flourishing-fund/).[^1][^2] ### Kazaa, Skype, and the Fortune Tallinn studied theoretical physics at the University of Tartu and in the 1990s worked as a programmer for a small Estonian software company, where he and colleagues including Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu built software that the Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis commercialized. Their first product was Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing program released in 2001 that became one of the most downloaded applications of its era. The same Estonian engineering team then repurposed the peer-to-peer architecture for voice traffic, producing Skype, which launched in 2003 and turned internet telephony into a mass-market product.[^1][^3] Skype was acquired by eBay in September 2005 for about 2.6 billion dollars, the transaction that converted Tallinn's founding stake into a fortune. eBay later wrote down the value of the unit and in 2009 sold a majority stake to an investor group led by Silver Lake; Microsoft then bought Skype outright in 2011 for roughly 8.5 billion dollars, at the time its largest acquisition. Tallinn has since invested more than 100 million dollars across more than 100 technology startups, and financial press has described him as one of the most prolific early backers of artificial-intelligence companies.[^3][^4] ### From the Singularity to Existential Risk Tallinn dates his concern with artificial intelligence to reading the online writings of [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/) in the late 2000s, after which he began to treat advanced AI as a potential threat to human survival rather than a commercial opportunity. He became an early and recurring donor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Berkeley organization Yudkowsky cofounded, giving it more than a million dollars across grants beginning around 2015, and to the Future of Humanity Institute, the University of Oxford research center founded by the philosopher [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/) whose book "Superintelligence" framed much of the field.[^2][^5] His worldview overlaps heavily with [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) and Longtermism, the movements that argue resources should be directed toward reducing low-probability, high-consequence risks to the long-term future. Tallinn has framed his investment philosophy as an attempt to "displace money that doesn't care," putting his own capital into AI companies so that safety-minded shareholders sit alongside purely commercial ones. By 2023 he was publicly describing this strategy as having failed, telling Semafor that the labs he backed would not support a pause on frontier development and that he had shifted toward advocating government-imposed limits on the computing power used to train AI systems.[^5][^6] ### CSER and the Future of Life Institute In 2012 Tallinn cofounded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University together with the philosopher Huw Price and the cosmologist Martin Rees, after a chance meeting with Price in a Copenhagen taxi led to a collaboration on risks from advanced technology. He supplied the initiative's early private funding and remains associated with the center, which studies catastrophic risks from AI, biotechnology, and environmental collapse.[^1][^7] Two years later, in March 2014, he was among the cofounders of the Future of Life Institute near Boston alongside the [MIT](/organizations/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/) physicist Max Tegmark, the researcher Viktoriya Krakovna, the physicist Anthony Aguirre, and Meia Chita-Tegmark. FLI became one of the most visible AI-risk organizations, organizing the 2015 Puerto Rico and 2017 Asilomar conferences and publishing the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. Tallinn has served on its board and remained among its backers.[^7][^8] ### DeepMind and Anthropic Tallinn was one of the individual investors in DeepMind, the London AI laboratory founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman; he put money into its early funding around 2011 alongside [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/), [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/), [Founders Fund](/organizations/founders-fund/), and Horizons Ventures, and DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported sum above 500 million dollars. He has said his motive was to gain visibility into and influence over a project he considered dangerous rather than to profit from it.[^4][^9] In May 2021 Tallinn led the 124-million-dollar Series A of Anthropic, the AI company founded by [Dario Amodei](/people/dario-amodei/) and [Daniela Amodei](/people/daniela-amodei/) after they left [OpenAI](/organizations/openai/). Anthropic's own announcement of the round, dated May 28, 2021, named Tallinn as the lead and listed participation from James McClave, [Dustin Moskovitz](/people/dustin-moskovitz/), the Center for Emerging Risk Research, and former Google chief executive [Eric Schmidt](/people/eric-schmidt/); the company was valued at roughly 623 million dollars at the time. As Anthropic's valuation climbed into the tens of billions of dollars over the following years, the early stake became one of the most valuable bets of Tallinn's investing career.[^10][^11] ### The Survival and Flourishing Fund Since 2019 Tallinn has routed much of his existential-risk giving through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, a grant-allocation vehicle that uses a software-assisted method called the S-process to distribute money to longtermist and AI-safety organizations. The fund has organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts across its rounds, and Tallinn is consistently named as its principal funder. He was included in the 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list for this body of giving.[^2][^12] He also holds a number of advisory roles connected to AI governance, including membership on the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and on the board of the Center for AI Safety, and he sits on the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has continued to fund and speak for the view that uncontrolled development of superintelligent systems is among the leading threats to humanity's survival.[^1][^5] [^1]: "Jaan Tallinn," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk team page, University of Cambridge, on his cofounding of CSER with Huw Price and Martin Rees, his Skype and Kazaa background, and his advisory roles. https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/jaan-tallinn/ [^2]: "TIME100 Philanthropy: Jaan Tallinn," Time, 2026, on the Survival and Flourishing Fund directing roughly 150 million dollars to more than 300 projects, his MIRI giving, and his role founding FLI and CSER. https://time.com/collection/time100-philanthropy/2026/jaan-tallinn/ [^3]: "Skype and Kazaa co-founder Jaan Tallinn on AI and the Singularity," Singularity Weblog, on the Estonian engineering team, Kazaa (2001), and Skype (2003). https://www.singularityweblog.com/jaan-tallinn/ [^4]: "Jaan Tallinn: The Quiet Force Behind AI's Biggest Bets," Dealroom, on his more than 100 million dollars across more than 100 startups and his stakes in DeepMind and Anthropic. https://app.dealroom.co/news/note/jaan-tallinn-the-quiet-force-behind-ai-s-biggest-bets [^5]: "Co-founder of Skype invested in hot AI startups but thinks he failed," Semafor, April 28, 2023, on his MIRI and FHI donations, the "displace money that doesn't care" philosophy, and his shift toward compute caps. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/28/2023/co-founder-of-skype-invested-in-hot-ai-startups-but-thinks-he-failed [^6]: "Microsoft to Acquire Skype," Microsoft News, May 10, 2011, on the 8.5-billion-dollar Microsoft acquisition from the Silver Lake-led investor group; eBay's September 2005 acquisition of Skype for about 2.6 billion dollars and the later write-down. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2011/05/10/microsoft-to-acquire-skype-3/ [^7]: "About Us," Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and "Future of Life Institute," on the 2012 founding of CSER and the March 2014 founding of FLI with Tegmark, Krakovna, Aguirre, and Chita-Tegmark. https://www.cser.ac.uk/about-us/ [^8]: "New International Grants Program Jump-Starts Research to Ensure AI Remains Beneficial," Future of Life Institute, 2015, on FLI's founding, conferences, and grant program. https://futureoflife.org/ai/2015selection/ [^9]: "Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind For More Than $500M," TechCrunch, January 26, 2014, on DeepMind's 2010 founding, early investors including Tallinn, Musk, Thiel, Founders Fund, and Horizons Ventures, and the Google acquisition. https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/ [^10]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 28, 2021, on Tallinn leading the Series A and the named participants James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, the Center for Emerging Risk Research, and Eric Schmidt. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems [^11]: "Series A - Anthropic," Crunchbase, on the May 2021 round and the roughly 623-million-dollar valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/anthropic-series-a--61db4cbd [^12]: "Survival and Flourishing Fund," on the S-process, Jaan Tallinn as principal funder, and the roughly 150 million dollars organized across rounds since 2019. https://survivalandflourishing.fund/