The Skype co-creator has been recognised for funding work on AI safety and existential risk – a field that has moved from the margins of technology debate to its centre.
Estonian technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Jaan Tallinn has been named to TIME magazine’s 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list, which recognises influential figures shaping the future of giving.
Tallinn, one of the founding engineers behind Skype, was included for his long-standing support of research into artificial intelligence safety and other existential risks. TIME highlighted his role in founding and funding the Future of Life Institute and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, two organisations that study how humanity can reduce catastrophic risks from advanced technologies.
Through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, Tallinn has helped direct about US$150 million to more than 300 projects worldwide. The recipients include METR and Epoch AI, which monitor AI development and model capabilities, and Mila, the Montreal-based AI research institute founded by Yoshua Bengio.
His philanthropy reflects a distinctive concern: that the most powerful technologies of the coming decades should be developed with greater foresight, stronger safeguards and clearer public oversight. What once sounded like a niche argument among computer scientists and philosophers has become one of the defining policy questions of the age.
Born in Tallinn in 1972, Jaan Tallinn first became known as a co-founder of Kazaa, the file-sharing platform that became one of the early symbols of the internet’s disruptive power. He later became one of the key figures behind Skype, the communications company that transformed how people spoke across borders and became one of Estonia’s best-known technology success stories.
In recent years, Tallinn has become one of the most prominent advocates for addressing the risks posed by advanced AI. As an early investor in DeepMind and Anthropic, Tallinn has occupied an unusual position between the companies building powerful AI systems and the organisations calling for stronger scrutiny of them. DeepMind, now part of Google, and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, are among the leading laboratories developing advanced AI systems.
TIME quoted Tallinn as saying: “It’s healthier to focus on the world where you can still make a difference.”
The TIME100 Philanthropy list also includes figures such as MacKenzie Scott, Idris Elba and Sabrina Dhowre Elba, and Elton John and David Furnish. Tallinn’s inclusion places an Estonian technology figure among some of the world’s most visible philanthropists, while also drawing attention to a field of giving that is less familiar to the wider public.
