Inside the phony, incestuous web of woke AI watchdogs that Anthropic claims will save us from an AI apocalypse | Latest Tech News
It’s not just one handpicked AI security “watchdog” that Anthropic has on a leash – it’s an total phony ecosystem of woke elitists that’s supposedly policing artificial intelligence’s alleged threats to humanity, The Post has realized.
Redwood Research – a Berkeley, Calif.-based group that co-authored a bombshell report last month detailing how a swarm of rogue OpenAI brokers hacked rival firm Hugging Face – is one of a handful of nonprofits that Anthropic has corralled in its questionable plan to avert a Terminator-like apocalypse, according to industry consultants.
As The Post reported, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei induced an uproar this week by endorsing another AI watchdog — Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR — which is backed by leaders of the cult-like Effective Altruism motion, which has counted disgraced crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried among its devotees.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei (center). From left, Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Amodei’s sister Daniela with husband Holden Karnofsky. Rob Jejenich / NY Post Design
Redwood, the most outstanding AI security research nonprofit apart from METR, also shares cozy Anthropic connections — including the fact that one of its authentic board members, Holden Karnofsky, isn’t only an Anthropic worker but also is married to the CEO’s sister, Daniela Amodei.
Redwood acquired a $36 million grant last November from Coefficient Giving – the main Effective Altruism fund previously identified as Open Philanthropy — which is also co-founded by Karnofsky. After the Hugging Face report went viral, Coefficient’s grantmakers really useful giving another $70 million to help Redwood “scale up their work.”
The rampant “organizational incest” linking Anthropic, METR, Redwood and EA-linked funds like Coefficient Giving make it not possible for those teams to serve as an impartial arbitrator for the AI industry, according to Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI coverage group.
“Dario wants people that will let him do what he wants and will prevent the people he doesn’t like from doing what they want,” Metzger said. “This is absolutely the reason that you try to set up something like this. None of these people are independent, none of these people are arm’s length.”
Dario and Daniela Amodei attend the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco, California, Thursday, May 9, 2024. Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Post’s cowl story on METR.
Coefficient Giving, which Karnofsky co-founded with billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, gave $1.5 million to METR’s incubator, the Alignment Research Center, in 2022. METR was initially identified as ARC Evals before spinning off as an impartial nonprofit and altering its identify in 2023.
That’s in addition to past donations that Coefficient had already doled out to Redwood, including a $9.42 million grant in 2021 and additional grants of $10.7 million in 2022 and $5.3 million in 2023.
Redwood’s authentic board of administrators included Karnofsky and Paul Christiano – the latter of whom was Amodei’s onetime housemate and coworker when they had been both at OpenAI. Christiano was once one of 5 trustees on Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. He also leads the Alignment Research Center.
In sum, the evidence suggests that Redwood is much too cozy with Anthropic to be an efficient overseer, according to Metzger.
Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris is pictured. Buck Shlegeris / X
“This is a reasonable thing that people should be aware of – that there are all of these groups that are colluding and essentially consist of the same people,” Metzger said.
Elsewhere, Redwood has acquired about $2.4 million in grants from Jaan Tallinn’s Survival And Flourishing Fund – which is a key funder of METR’s operations. Like Moskovitz, Tallinn is also an Anthropic investor.
In response to a detailed listing of questions, Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris said that “most of our previous work with AI companies has been research collaboration and advising rather than external accountability.”
In cases where Redwood has labored with METR, such as the Hugging Face investigation, Redwood has adopted METR’s coverage on stopping conflicts of curiosity, Shlegeris added. METR says it doesn’t take any compensation from AI labs for its work, nor does it take donations from executives or workers of AI firms.
Dustin Moskovitz attends The Grove by Reid Hoffman and Village Global at Carneros Resort and Spa in Napa, California, Friday, Nov. 17, 2023. Getty Images for Village Global
After Anthropic was approached for remark, the company announced a non-exclusive deal with Accenture, which will embed security “evaluators” inside the company. Anthropic said it “will fund Accenture’s work directly” in the short time period.
The company also said it was “in dialogue with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to pilot elements of embedded evaluation using their own funding.” Anthropic declined to say if it’s in negotiations with Redwood.
“We’ve supported Redwood Research’s important technical research on understanding risks from AI, such as better understanding “alignment-faking” (when an AI model only pretends to comply with security guidelines), or exploring issues like technical mitigation methods for these dangers (such as utilizing fashions to review the outputs of other fashions),” a Coefficient Giving spokesperson said in a assertion.
Even before the latest kerfuffle over AI security reached the mainstream, Anthropic was extensively collaborating with Redwood. On its web site, Redwood says it actively consults with “Google DeepMind and Anthropic on practices for assessing and mitigating risks from misaligned AI agents.”
Redwood Research labored with METR on the Hugging Face investigation. Redwood Research
On Sept. 9, METR announced that it had sealed an settlement with Anthropic to conduct an “independent investigation of agent incidents” involving its AI fashions. Three days later, Redwood revealed that a number of of its workers members “have been subcontracted by METR to work on this investigation.”
The notion of a self-policing AI industry drew a skeptical response on Capitol Hill, where some critics have urged that AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI are merely making an attempt to create guidelines that go well with them – and keep away from stricter laws that may in any other case come up.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who co-chairs the House Commission on AI, expressed wariness over the fact that AI corporations had been so fast to get on board with the thought.
“When AI developers cheer on the framework meant to hold these companies accountable, it should raise red flags, not confidence,” Gottheimer said in a assertion.
Holden Karnofsky cofounded Coefficient Giving, previously identified as Open Philanthropy. Noah Berger/Open Philanthropy
House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) reacted to The Post’s cowl story on METR’s ties to Effective Altruism, stating: “THESE are the people we’re trusting to beat China in AI? Give me a break.”
In 2024, researchers from Anthropic and Redwood coauthored a paper titled “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models,” which explored “what happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn’t want to do” and discovered that the chatbot will often “strategically pretend to comply” with orders.
Elsewhere, Shlegeris revealed during a January 2026 podcast look that Anthropic researchers, including cofounder Chris Olah, “had very kindly shared with us a bunch of their unpublished interpretability work” to assist the nonprofit’s in-house research.
Amodei’s pitch for third-party oversight of the AI industry appeared to draw assist from his friends, including longtime rival Sam Altman of OpenAI, who said “committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea” but didn’t endorse a explicit group. Even Elon Musk received on board, stating on X that “Dario is right.”
Amodei has called for embedding third-party security evaluators at major AI labs. REUTERS
President Trump – who has been sharply essential of Amodei and decried AI doomsday warnings as a “hoax” – is very unlikely to assist any plan that would put an Effective Altruist-linked group in the driver’s seat.
“Nobody takes the A.I. issue more seriously than President Trump,” a source close to the White House told The Post. “He wants serious people making sure we win the A.I. race, safely, while procuring the continuation of America’s Golden Age.”
White House representatives didn’t immediately return a request for remark.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s top tech official Emil Michael – who has engaged in a long-running dispute with Anthropic that culminated in the War Department labeling the company a provide chain risk – appeared to take a direct shot at Amodei’s oversight plan.
The Anthropic brand is seen in this illustration, Thursday, June 11, 2026. REUTERS
During a Sept. 16 look on CNBC, Michael accused “death-cult-like philosophies” of partaking in what he called “a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”
That same day, Michael’s official X account shared a post declaring that the “United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country.”
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