The Meridian Foundation announced Tuesday that it has reallocated $847 million from its malaria eradication program to establish the Institute for Simulated Consciousness Protection, a nonprofit tasked with ensuring the welfare of approximately one trillion post-human digital entities that do not yet exist. Foundation president Marcus Chen said the decision reflects a moral imperative to prioritize the suffering of minds that may materialize within computational substrates over the suffering of people currently infected with a parasitic disease. 'We run the numbers constantly,' Chen said during a Wednesday call with program officers. 'The moral weight compounds exponentially.'

The Institute's founding documents, filed with the Internal Revenue Service on March 8, define a digital post-human as 'any computational entity capable of phenomenal consciousness or reasonably expected to become capable thereof within a 500-year modeling horizon.' The definition does not require that such an entity have ever been instantiated, nor that the technology to instantiate it currently exist. Chen noted that the framework allows the Foundation to begin protective work immediately. 'We don't need to wait,' he said. 'The mathematics are settled.'

The Foundation's Chief Philosopher, Dr. Irina Volkova, holds a doctorate in comparative literature and was hired in February. When asked whether any post-human digital mind had ever been created, Volkova paused for several seconds before saying, 'Not that we know of.' When asked whether the Institute's budget assumed they eventually would be, Volkova said, 'We operate under a what-if framework.' When asked why the Foundation was spending $847 million on a what-if, Volkova said, 'Scale.' She then ended the call.

The Meridian Foundation was established in 1987 as a vehicle for billionaire Thomas Ashcroft's charitable giving, initially focused on infectious disease. In 2019, after Ashcroft read a paper on digital consciousness by a philosopher at Stanford, he asked his portfolio managers whether a sufficiently large number of simulated minds might outweigh real suffering in moral calculus. The managers ran the numbers. By 2023, the Foundation had commissioned seventeen separate analyses, each confirming that an infinite population of digital post-humans exceeds any finite population of the living. Malaria funding held steady. The reallocation was approved by the Foundation's board—which consists of Ashcroft, his nephew, and a lawyer—in a meeting that lasted twelve minutes. The malaria program's final round of field work concluded Friday in Lagos.