The weirder question is why they think the potential donors shouldn't apply same sort of criteria to the sellers of the AI risk reduction. Say, you want photo-realistic ray traced photon mapped mmorpg. The hardware doesn't support this, but I'm sure there's a few startups making something like that, talking to investors, drafting plans how they must hire topcoder and other programming contest winners and optics experts... hell I myself have been approached by such folks at least 4 times that I remember, with 'job offers'. The common feature of such startups? They aren't founded by awesome tech guys themselves, because those tech guys not only are tech guys but also have much better grasp of the big-picture issues and see that its too early.