Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is pouring millions of dollars into combating AI’s dark side
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
Source: Bleacher + Everard
Craig Newmark made his fortune off a website, founded in 1995, that served as an early online bulletin board and looks like it hasn’t been updated in two decades.
That website, Craigslist, is still cranking along, featuring apartment listings, an active jobs board and items for sale. But the privately held company has long been surpassed in value by the likes of Airbnb, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace, which all face Wall Street’s demands for growth and profit.
Though Newmark’s internet company may be outdated, his concerns about where the industry is headed are most certainly not. Since the 2015 debut of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the entrepreneur has donated many millions of dollars to various causes involving media and technology.
Most recently, his organization contributed $3 million to help fund a new artificial intelligence and education initiative from Common Sense Media, the nonprofit told CNBC this week.
“While I tried to pay some attention to what was going on, just everything caught me by surprise,” Newmark said, referring to the current boom of generative AI and all the new and intelligent chatbots.
Newmark, 70, spoke to CNBC as he was recovering from a minor heart procedure he went through in late August. The heart ablation required Newmark to lay on his back “the whole time in the wrong position” and he “woke up with a lot of back pain,” he said.
More than the surgery, Newmark wanted to talk about the hospital food.
“Hospital pudding is really good,” he said. “And since they served my lunch cold, I asked them and got more containers of pudding.”
Newmark, who ran his business out of San Francisco but now lives with his wife in New York, said the hospital stay didn’t cause him to reflect much on mortality, as he’d already addressed such existential issues when he decided to simplify his life by giving away much of his Craigslist riches.
Newmark’s foundation has principally focused on donating to organizations and causes pertaining to journalism, combating misinformation, countering online harassment, cybersecurity issues, and supporting veterans and military families.
The rapid evolution of AI and its potential hazards have recently caught Newmark’s attention, and his money.
The goal of Common Sense’s AI project is to provide an AI ratings system for parents, educators, policymakers and regulators so they can evaluate what makes certain tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT safe or unsafe for children. Additionally, the nonprofit is offering online AI literacy courses intended to help parents and educators teach basic AI fundamentals to children.
The full scope of AI’s capabilities and potential for societal harm became more clear to Newmark by the time companies began “modifying search engines to use generative AI.”
“I realized that if a search engine was using sources that weren’t reliable, if the sources were about lying to people, that would create a big, ethical problem, and you really don’t want a news source of any sort to knowingly lie,” Newmark said.
Newmark is concerned that bad actors will use generative AI to more easily amplify and spread disinformation. At the same time, he’s worried that tech companies, particularly in social media, “aren’t even trying anymore to get rid of stuff they know is dishonest,” he said.
Tech companies like Meta, Amazon and X (formerly known as Twitter) recently laid off numerous trust and safety workers as part of major cost-cutting initiatives, but have said that the downsizing won’t affect the safety of their platforms.
‘Bad uses’ of the internet
Meanwhile, AI has the potential to profoundly affect society, like the internet and the printing press before it, Newmark said. That’s an area where he has notable expertise. Craigslist was both hugely disruptive to newspapers and their classified ads sections, and has been a site that’s attracted criminals and scammers.
Few people predicted the “bad uses” of the internet, which has allowed nefarious actors to “mostly lie to people in large numbers,” Newmark said.
“I guess the profits to be made in being a really good professional liar, those profits have greatly increased because the internet is a big amplifier,” Newmark said. “It’s everyone’s printing press, and you get to use it as a printing press, whether your intentions are good or bad.”
Newmark said he became interested in language-generating software like ChatGPT in the early 1970s, “when people were beginning to talk about language understanding and neural networks.” However, he says, “I didn’t really understand it.”
Now the technology is here and spreading rapidly.
Newmark said he doesn’t want to name names when it comes to the organizations he fears are creating the most societal discontent through AI, because he’s previously been scarred for getting that specific.
“In the past when I’ve pointed out major problems, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m no match for someone who lies for a living,” Newmark said. “So, I’m allowing myself to be chickens—.”
Rather, he said he relies on “people who are both braver and smarter” to call public attention to those matters.
“Protecting kids when it comes to AI is a big issue,” Newmark said, regarding his donation to Common Sense Media. “I have no idea how I would go about getting started, but I know where to put my money where my mouth is.”
Why Common Sense?
“A lot of groups and politicians talk about protecting kids,” Newmark said. “But these guys are the real deal, and so I’m helping them.”
Misinformation and journalism
Newmark acknowledged that the topics of misinformation, journalism and content moderation have become more polarized and politicized of late. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, alleged that tech companies unfairly censor conservative speech, and he’s undertaken a “censorship investigation” to probe suspected ties between the executive branch and certain technologists and researchers.
Several academics previously told CNBC that the politicized landscape has led to some organizations cutting back on funding research into combating misinformation for fear of being publicly criticized.
“Some people are backing off, some people are getting braver. Again, I’m not very brave,” Newmark said. He highlighted the Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation as organizations that are “doing brave things.”
Within journalism, Newmark’s most high-profile endeavor is the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School in Journalism. The program was renamed in 2018 after Newmark endowed the school with a $20 million gift, though he made prior contributions in 2016 and 2017.
He also donated $20 million in 2018 to help fund The Markup, which describes itself as a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society.” That project quickly became controversial after founding Editor-in-Chief Julia Angwin said she’d been fired over email by co-founder and Executive Director Sue Gardner.
Still, Newmark says both the CUNY journalism school and The Markup have been successful, while other efforts “have not been successful, and I’m being discreet about them because I’m still trying to help before I have much sterner talks.”
He pegs his philanthropy success rate at “70% or 80%, which is good, but it’s not 100.”
In terms of where he spends his time online, Newmark said he still posts on X, primarily to promote and highlight the work of teachers. However, he said the site is losing its effectiveness as it leans toward showing people algorithmically recommended posts.
Thilina Kaluthotage | Nurphoto | Getty Images
“As a social network, Twitter does seem to be gone,” Newmark said, adding that he’s trying out rivals like Bluesky, Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.
In particular, Newmark said he likes “like the spirit of Mastodon and Bluesky,” which he likened to the early days of the internet when it took a long time for websites to build devoted audiences.
“The audience development is very slow,” Newmark said. “Twitter and everything else grew slowly and the other sites are growing slowly, and yet we are impatient and we want to see network effects now.”
Cybersecurity is another area of focus for Newmark. He pointed to a recent $100 million commitment announced in March to a collection of organizations working on cyber-related issues, like combating the spread of ransomware and creating methods for tech and security companies to share threat information.
He said the total number will probably exceed $100 million, because he’s already “broken through $80 million.”
In June, Newmark’s philanthropy arm also pledged to donate $100 million to multiple organizations supporting veterans and military members, who “sometimes have to choose between decent housing or feeding their families,” Newmark said. He called the treatment of that community “a national security matter.”
“There’s nothing virtuous in that,” Newmark said about his donations, noting that he doesn’t spend his money on “yachts or fast cars.”
“It’s more satisfying to give it away,” Newmark said. “Again, that’s not pious or altruistic. It’s just what I was taught in Sunday school.”
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Technology
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More companies are announcing AI-driven layoffs from Salesforce to Accenture.
Twenty20
From tech to airlines, large global companies have been slashing staff as the real-world impact of artificial intelligence plays out, spooking employees. But critics say AI has become an easy excuse for firms looking to downsize.
Last month, tech consultancy firm Accenture announced a restructuring plan that includes quick exits for workers that aren’t first able to reskill on AI. Days later, Lufthansa said it was going to eliminate 4,000 jobs by 2030 as it leans on AI to increase efficiency.
Salesforce also laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, saying that AI can do 50% of the work at the company. Meanwhile, fintech firm Klarna has reduced staff by 40% as it aggressively adopts AI tools.
Language-learning platform Duolingo has stated that it will gradually stop relying on contractors and use AI to fill the gaps.
The headlines are grim, but Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, said there might be more to job cuts than meets the eye.
Previously there may have been some stigma attached to using AI, but now companies are “scapegoating” the technology to take the fall for challenging business moves such as layoffs.
“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s rather really a projection into AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,'” Stephany said in an interview with CNBC.
Companies can essentially position themselves at the frontier of AI technology to appear innovative and competitive, and simultaneously conceal the real reasons for layoffs, according to Stephany.
“There might be various other reasons why companies are having to get rid of part of their workforce … Duolingo or Klarna are really prime candidates for this because there has been overhiring during Corona [Covid-19 pandemic] as well,” the professor said.
Some companies that flourished during the pandemic “significantly overhired” and the recent layoffs might just be a “market clearance.”
“It’s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long term perspective and instead of saying “we miscalculated this two, three years ago, they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying ‘it’s because of AI though,'” he added.
This pattern has sparked conversation online. One founder, Jean-Christophe Bouglé even said in a popular LinkedIn post that AI adoption is at a “much slower pace” than is being claimed and in large corporations “there’s not much happening” with AI projects even being rolled back due to cost or security concerns.
“At the same time there are announcements of big layoff plans ‘because of AI.’ It looks like a big excuse, in a context where the economy in many countries is slowing down, despite what the incredible performance of stock exchanges suggest,” said Bouglé, who co-founded Authentic.ly.
Feeding the fear of AI
Jasmine Escalera, a careers expert, said this concealment is “feeding the fear of AI” with employees globally concerned about their jobs being replaced as a result of AI.
“So we already know that employees are scared because companies are not being honest, open and communicative about how they’re implementing AI,” Escalera told CNBC Make It. “Now companies are openly stating ‘We’re doing this [layoffs] because of AI’ so it’s feeding the frenzy.”
Escalera said big companies need to be more responsible as they set the tone for what’s the norm in business decision making and avoid greenlighting “bad behavior.”
A Salesforce spokesperson clarified to CNBC that the company deployed its own AI agent, Agentforce, which reduced the number of customer support cases and eliminated the need to “backfill support engineer roles,” they said.
“We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success,” the Salesforce spokesperson added.
Klarna directed CNBC to its co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s comments on X where he explained that the company shrank its workforce from 5,500 to 3,000 people in two years but “AI is only part of that story.”
Siemiatkowski linked the workforce reduction to slimming down its analytics team to one “success team,” with many then leaving by natural attrition as well as the reduction of the company’s customer success team.
Lufthansa and Accenture declined to comment on the matter and did not share any further details on their AI restructuring strategy. Duolingo did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Mass AI layoffs are not here
The Budget Lab, a non-partisan policy research center at Yale University, released a report on Wednesday which showed that U.S. labor has actually been little disrupted by AI automation since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
The lab examined U.S. labor market data from November 2022 to July 2025 using a “dissimilarity index” which measured how much the occupational mix—the share of workers in different jobs—has shifted since AI’s debut and compared it to other technological shifts such as the introduction of computers and the internet. It found that AI hasn’t yet caused widespread job losses.
Additionally, New York Fed economists released research in early September which showed that AI use amongst firms “do not point to significant reductions in employment” across the services and manufacturing industry in the New York–Northern New Jersey region.
It found that 40% of service firms said they were using AI this year, up from 25% last year, while manufacturing firms saw a similar jump from 16% last year to 26% this year, but very few were using AI to layoff workers.
Only 1% of the services firm reported AI as the reason for laying off workers in the past six months, down from 10% that had laid off workers using AI in 2024. Meanwhile, 12% of services firms said AI made them hire less workers in 2025.
By contrast, 35% of services firms have used AI to retrain employees and 11% have hired more as a result.
Stephany said there isn’t much evidence from his research that shows large levels of technological unemployment due to AI.
“Economists call this structural unemployment, so the pie of work is not big enough for everybody anymore and so people will lose jobs definitely because of of AI, I don’t think that this is happening on a mass scale,” he said.
He added that concerns about technology putting an end to human work can be seen throughout history.
“It reoccurred this century alone a dozen times, you can go back to ancient times where Roman emperors put hold to certain machines because they were worried about this and always the contrary happened. The machine made companies, industries more productive.
“It allowed for the emergence of entirely new jobs. If you think about the internet 20 years ago, nobody would have known what a social media influencer is, what an app developer is because it didn’t exist.”
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