Sam Bankman-Fried Is the Spiritual (and Financial) Godfather of Anthropic AI

There is so much to unpack in the current AI Doomerism mania that is sweeping the nation. Some of the doomerism is certainly organic, but a large fraction of it is just the “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” that is so often spread around so that master manipulators can lead the ignorant around by the nose. 

I can’t cover it all in one post, and unpacking it would take a deeper dive than I have time for. No doubt many books will be written about it once the frenzy passes and AI is just another technological advancement that changes the world without destroying it, but I will not be one of the authors. 

I write six posts a day here, and when I get around to the book I think I might write, it will be centered on the broad themes I keep coming back to here. Let somebody else do the investigative research, and I will steal the particulars to make my own points. Division of labor and all that. 

There is no such thing as ‘super-intelligent’ AI. This is a myth pushed by the Silicon Valley cult of Effective Altruism. Every story about AI ‘going rogue’ is easily disproven, says Andrew Orlowskihttps://t.co/jMSqqLvSKF

— spiked (@spikedonline) August 30, 2026

But one interesting thread to unravel is the deep connections between the face of Doomerism and the so-called “Effective Altruism” movement, from which Sam Bankman-Fried, his creepy girlfriend in their “Polycule,” and the top figures in the FTX scandal all came. 

Dario Amodei and just about everybody in the AI Safety community are all also connected with this rather creepy group, and the connections run much deeper than almost anybody knows. Much of the original funding for Anthropic, Amodei’s company, came from a funding round led by Bankman-Fried, and the NGOs now pushing for Amodei’s vision of an AI safety regime are all associates who have worked together through the EA movement. 

This is the story that killed Anthropic’s credibility in ten minutes of reading. https://t.co/FPEQfqkICJ

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) September 16, 2026

These organizations are run by a tight circle of friends all sharing the same financial interests and ideological leanings, and any pretense of “independence” is entirely made up. They are, for all intents and purposes, a clan. 

🚨 “Dario Amodei is copying literally the exact same tactics used by Sam Bankman-Fried in order to achieve regulatory monopoly.”

Reminder: Convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried led Anthropic’s $580 MILLION funding round in 2022. pic.twitter.com/50R5KLOtIQ

— Innovation Council (@innovationcncl) September 17, 2026

You may recall that SBF was a big advocate of a regulatory structure for cryptocurrency and was one of the largest donors to the Democrat Party back when he was a free man. He worked assiduously on Washington connections and made much the same set of arguments for regulation and how it should be implemented as the AI titans do now. The parallels are everywhere, and that is no accident. It is largely the same group of people. 

He explicitly told @SpecialReport that he didn’t work with any third parties to set up his resignation announcement.

Now he says that his “friends who work in policy” hooked him up with the WSJ exclusive. pic.twitter.com/U1Gndhc1u3 https://t.co/V3bYTm9n08

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 15, 2026

Even the “whistleblowers” are part of this same set of people, which should at least make you suspicious. I can’t wait to learn about the bizarre Polycules, should they exist, and wonder why such unattractive people wind up in the same cult. 

Now the Effective Altruists start with some non-crazy ideas — that we should prioritize our charitable giving to the highest-value projects, not the most sexy ones. But from there, they go off the rails into arguments such as “giving money to rebuild Notre Dame is a form of murder, since that money could be used to save lives. 

Here is Beth Barnes, the Effective Altruist CEO of METR, explaining how immigration controls are immoral, and that future generations will be embarrassed by the past existence of borders.

This is who Anthropic wants as the “independent” overseer of all frontier AI models. pic.twitter.com/6N2iSVOc4g

— Allum Bokhari (@AllumBokhari) September 17, 2026

And one of the principles that pops out here, as we saw in the FTX scandal, is the strong belief that making gobs of money is necessary to be as altruistic as possible. SBF often justified his sketchy practices by claiming he did so much good with it. 

Yeah, and the lifestyle was pretty nice too. Heaven’s Gate followers only got some cool Nikes; the EA crowd gets beachfront property too. And free love, if you don’t mind lots of sex with rather unattractive people. 

Worried what AI will do to the world? Don’t fret — we got a group of woke elitists who will protect us.

That’s the pitch from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world.

It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote “Effective Altruism,” that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology.

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. 

I’m not going to go into the complicated web of connections between all the players in the Anthropic/AI game, since The New York Post did all the work. 

I won’t go so far as to say that Amodei is running a scam with Anthropic, because Claude is a real product with real value that people use for productive work, but it’s obvious that the business model is something of a scam, or has all the hallmarks of one. The same is true for OpenAI, for that matter. They are first movers in a real industry with significant potential. But as with the British railroad bubble, the product was real and would revolutionize transportation; the actual businesses were run by sucking up and burning through money that would never be paid back. 

🚨🚨🚨

Effective Altruism is a cult.

America must reject it.

Wholeheartedly. pic.twitter.com/dyThOF1l5z

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) September 17, 2026

SBF tried to use his Washington connections to paper over the fundamental financial problems of his business, and the AI companies are running with the same strategy. If they can use the doomerism to frighten Republicans into joining with Democrats, who are as tied up with Amodei as they were with SBF, they may succeed where he failed. 

Big Short investor Steve Eisman says the AI labs know they have no moats and are manufacturing a crisis to get regulation that hands them a duopoly

“I think this is all nonsense.”

[ You think it’s all nonsense? ]

“All nonsense. I think that there’s something else completely… pic.twitter.com/AiIdiYPJly

— CEOInterviews.AI (@CEOinterview) September 17, 2026

Big Short investor Steve Eisman says the AI labs know they have no moats and are manufacturing a crisis to get regulation that hands them a duopoly

“I think this is all nonsense.”

[ You think it’s all nonsense? ]

“All nonsense. I think that there’s something else completely going on here. … What I think is happening is that token maxing is over. The open weight models are taking big market share. I think these companies are very nervous. They realize that there are no moats around their business whatsoever, and they’re trying to manufacture a crisis that will create regulation, and that they think they can then manipulate to create the moats, to create the duopoly that they want.”

[ Wow. ]

“That’s what I think is going on.”

“Honestly, I think this whole Terminator thing is garbage. That’s for sure.”

More likely, though, there will be significant pushback. The Trump administration doesn’t buy it, and Apple just got into building hardware for local AI and is betting big bucks it will pay off. I doubt they will simply accede to the wishes of the AI firms, and Apple has real money to burn. And it’s pretty clear that Nvidia isn’t excited about the new Doomerism for obvious reasons. 

Under Secretary Emil Michael (@USWREMichael) breaks down the ideology of “effective altruism” in the AI domain and explains why its worldview is deeply flawed:

“It’s a sort of dystopian, ‘Brave New World’ view of the world, where machines that are using 1s and 0s are going to… pic.twitter.com/eVuq3n5xOD

— Department of War CTO (@DoWCTO) August 26, 2026

Under Secretary Emil Michael (@USWREMichael) breaks down the ideology of “effective altruism” in the AI domain and explains why its worldview is deeply flawed:

“It’s a sort of dystopian, ‘Brave New World’ view of the world, where machines that are using 1s and 0s are going to have no bias and are going to decide the perfectly rational and best thing for everyone on Earth. It’s a strange philosophical concept, and I don’t think it’s a place any normal person wants to live in. But that is the animation of a lot of these companies. They’ve now distanced themselves from it, but the detritus of that philosophy still lives inside these companies in my view.”

While the future of the incumbent AI companies’ play is uncertain, we as consumers should be very skeptical of everything these guys say. They are implying that they are acting altruistically by “warning” against their own products, but the opposite is true. They’re trying to establish a government-backed oligopoly, and the Biden administration was on board with that idea, as were the Democrats then, and they remain so today.

The Effective Altruists seek to consolidate all theological, technological, and political authority. Their algorithmic religion promises to flatten all that makes us unique, all that makes us human. It must be resisted.

Essential reading from @ssankar. https://t.co/2mojvaXuuN

— Antonin Scalia (@antonintscalia) September 14, 2026

 That part, at least, is a pretty obvious scam, and it is the same one that SBF tried to pull before he got caught and jailed. It’s largely the same group of people using the same playbook with some modifications. The pattern is pretty easy to see, once you look for it. 

Beware Effective Altruists bearing gifts. 

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