Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's handpicked AI watchdog has deep ties to woke Effective Altruism movement: ‘a complete joke'

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world — and it just so happens to have deep ties to his old housemate and the woke Effective Altruism movement that’s already been involved in one major tech meltdown.

In a bombshell essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argued that leading AI firms should commit to allowing “embedded third-party evaluators” from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, that would maintain “employee-like access” to oversee safety efforts and ensure advanced AI models don’t turn Terminator and wipe out humanity.

The would-be John Connors at METR purport to be fully independent, but the group traces its roots directly back to key figures in Effective Altruism, whose Silicon Valley-based devotees once included disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried, one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors.

Effective Altruism, a philosophy that’s become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe, advocates for using reason — and fortunes amassed by tech’s best and brightest — to do the most good for humanity over the long term.

In the past, it has been used to justify making as much money as possible with the idea that you can donate more later to do more good – though the movement suffered a big black eye when one of its most famous proponents, Bankman-Fried, saw his crypto empire collapse amid fraud charges that sent him to prison.

The overlap between METR and Anthropic is rife with potential conflicts of interest, according to critics.

METR spun off from an Effective Altruism-aligned tech incubator called Alignment Research Center (ARC), which is headed by AI researcher Paul Christiano. He was Amodei’s housemate, coworker and research collaborator in the 2010s when they were both at OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest rival.

Christiano also served as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.

One staffer on METR is Ajeya Cotra, who is married to Christiano and has been a major organizer in the EA world.

The founder and CEO of the group is Beth Barnes, who was hired by Christiano and was involved in the EA movement at college.

Chief scientist Hjalmar Wijk and staffers Megan Kinniment and Pip Arnott all came from the same research cluster at the University of Oxford — a major feeder for EA.

When reached by phone, a METR official acknowledged that the nonprofit has a lot of overlap with Effective Altruism, but insisted its employees have a diverse array of ideological viewpoints.

They’re required to disclose conflicts of interest, such as employees holding equity in firms they are tapped to investigate.

“We don’t think any small group should have authority over what happens with AI, and our goal is to get information from inside these companies into the public domain – external investigators can help bring more information to light,” a METR spokesperson said in a statement.

Amodei, who has pledged to give away 80% of his personal wealth, has deep ties to EA.

His sister Daniela married Holden Karnofsky, the founder of two major EA nonprofits.

METR’s involvement is likely to be a nonstarter for the Trump administration, which has had a testy relationship with Anthropic over the past year and has also expressed heavy skepticism of so-called AI “doomers” who argue the technology is on the precipice of disaster.

“METR is essentially Anthropic in another...