Sam Bankman-Fried’s surprising links to the ecosystem manipulating how you view AI | Latest Tech News
Silicon Valley billionaires bankrolling the Artificial Intelligence growth are also manipulating its notion — sponsoring research and testing labs, ambassadors and the journalists reporting on it.
The most impactful operation is by those concerned with the Effective Altruism (EA) motion, who have created an complete ecosystem which has propelled Anthropic from startup in 2021 to the forefront of AI and a $965 billion valuation today.
Backers such as Dustin Moskovitz and now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried poured money not just into the AI company, but also labs testing AI security and reporting on the industry.
Critics say the overlapping money has constructed an echo chamber, amplifying Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei’s doomerist message. But some say that message is probably going tactical.
“I think Dario seems to be using anxiety about safety as a weapon to control the pace of business,” Nathan Zhao, founding accomplice of tech investment firm SevenUp Capital, told The Post.
Nathan Zhao, founding accomplice of SevenUp Capital. Courtesy of Nathan Zhao
“In Anthropic’s early days, there was a strong cult-like culture. It started with a shared belief in putting safety first, but that could easily turn into employees having unquestioning faith in everything Dario said,” claimed Zhao, who’s spoken with a number of Anthropic staff.
Anthropic Co-Founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks at the Dreamforce 2026 summit, Tuesday, September 15, 2026, in San Francisco, California. REUTERS
Industry insiders claimed Amodei’s calls for authorities regulation of AI this week are self-serving, as smaller corporations would possible not have the funds to comply, upsetting many.
“What is Anthropic actually trying to achieve? Nobody knows. But this attitude is really irritating — they’re always claiming the moral high ground and criticizing everyone else,” said Richard Chang, an AI engineer who requested to withhold his employer’s particulars.
“[Until recently] people generally had a very positive impression of Anthropic. But people in the industry have started reacting very negatively to the various positions they’ve taken.”
The underlying message is Anthropic is the only company to be trusted and their means ahead is the most secure, a message being amplified through its community, which might be traced back to the company’s founding.
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of the collaborative software program company Asana, poses exterior of his workplace in San Francisco, Thursday, April 26, 2012. Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder and former roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, has launched an online collaboration app he says will change into the world’s next $100 billion company. AP
Moskovitz, previously of Facebook, took half in Anthropic’s $124 million funding spherical in 2021, which was led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.
Jaan Tallinn is pictured Saturday, May 24, 2014. Wikipedia
Moskovitz also sits on the board of Coefficient Giving, a nonprofit beforehand identified as Open Philanthropy, which he set up with spouse Cari Tuna.
Coefficient is also a major backer of the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which pays the salaries of over 80 reporters embedded to cowl the industry at shops including Time, Bloomberg, The Guardian and The Verge. The middle stresses its journalists are unbiased.
Meanwhile, another EA group, Longview Philanthropy — a nonprofit with $10 million in income according to authorities filings — funds Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), a company which assessments AI fashions’ benchmarks as nicely as existential threats. That company’s board has close ties to Anthropic and rivals OpenAI through its head, Paul Christiano, who used to be Amodei’s roommate. They both beforehand labored at OpenAI.
Finally, Anthropic pays evangelists in the discipline, recruiting and paying the salaries of 1,000 people to be the educated on its AI assistant Claude and embed in over 400 nonprofit organizations as the “Claude Corps.” They also pay Claude College Ambassadors and recruit Claude Community Ambassadors.
“Before, they were very public that the goal of many of these programs was to promote Effective Altruism,” Brian Chau, a machine learning engineer and founder of AI news web site Effort, told the Post.
That all modified with the December 2022 arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX and one of EA’s most distinguished champions.
Sam Bankman-Fried leaves the Moynihan United States Courthouse on Thursday, June 15, 2023, in New York. Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto trading platform FTX, faces financial fraud costs. Alec Tabak for NY Post
Chau said people in effective-altruism circles described Bankman-Fried as a mentor to Amodei before FTX collapsed, and regarded the affiliation as a badge of honor.
Chau argues that Amodei is now following Bankman-Fried’s method to regulation: calling for security guidelines that may also favor an established company.
“So it’s no surprise that he’s now copying literally the exact same tactics used by Sam Bankman-Fried in order to achieve regulatory monopoly,” Chau told The Post.
Bankman-Fried led Anthropic’s $580 million funding spherical in April 2022, months before his crypto empire collapsed and he was prosecuted for scamming buyers to the tune of $3 billion. Convicted of fraud and conspiracy, he’s now serving 25 years in prison.
“The description of the program 1789639473 is to ‘promote AI safety.’ They’ve stayed away from the term Effective Altruism ever since Sam Bankman-Fried got arrested,” Chau said.
Federal prosecutors pressured the sale of Bankman-Fried’s stake in Anthropic and other corporations to repay some of his money owed. He is no longer related or has a stake in any technology company.
In this courtroom sketch, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is seen during a listening to as a U.S. decide revoked his bail at a courthouse in New York, Friday, August 11, 2023. REUTERS
Chau said those concerned in EA are working their means into a troublesome place.
“The more the incentives make it so that you benefit from some kind of belief, the less you will know that’s why you’re believing it,” he said. “I feel that’s true of Dario, and I feel that’s true of most of these Effective Altruists.
“They don’t fully realize the reason they believe the world is going to end is because [of the same thing] that gives them status in their social circles and, for many of them, advantages economically.”
His level is echoed by a longtime follower of the EA motion, which has its roots in charity giving and philosophers William MacAskill and Peter Singer, but was only formalized over the last 15 years.
“I don’t like the switch in focus from global poverty and global health, fundraising for charities like the Against Malaria Foundation, to now a focus on existential fears about AI. That’s the main problem,” the source, who requested to stay nameless, told The Post.
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