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I understand why people shy away from/hide their identities when speaking with journalists but I think this is a mistake, largely for reasons covered in this post but I think a large part of the name brand of EA deteriorating is not just FTX but the risk-averse reaction to FTX by individuals (again, for understandable reasons) but that harms the movement in a way where the costs are externalized.

When PG refers to keeping your identity small, he means don't defend it or its characteristics for the sake of it. There's nothing wrong with being a C/C++ programmer, but realizing it's not the best for rapid development needs or memory safety. In this case, you can own being an EA/your affiliation to EA and not need to justify everything about the community.

We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don't want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you'd be happy to be associated with.

I'm a proud EA.

See in context

Anthropic is not being consistently candid about their connection to EA

by burner2

Mar 303 min read 88

287

AI safetyBuilding effective altruismCommunityAI governanceCriticism of effective altruismEffective altruism in the media

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In a recent Wired article about Anthropic, there's a section where Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei, and early employee Amanda Askell seem to suggest there's little connection between Anthropic and the EA movement:

Ask Daniela about it and she says, "I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term". Yet her husband, Holden Karnofsky, cofounded one of EA's most conspicuous philanthropy wings, is outspoken about AI safety, and, in January 2025, joined Anthropic. Many others also remain engaged with EA. As early employee Amanda Askell puts it, "I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it's not a theme of the organization or anything". (Her ex-husband, William MacAskill, is an originator of the movement.)

This led multiple people on Twitter to call out how bizarre this is:

In my eyes, there is a large and obvious connection between Anthropic and the EA community. In addition to the ties mentioned above:

Dario, Anthropic’s CEO, was the 43rd signatory of the Giving What We Can pledge and wrote a guest post for the GiveWell blog. He also lived in a group house with Holden Karnofsky and Paul Christiano at a time when Paul and Dario were technical advisors to Open Philanthropy.
Amanda Askell was the 67th signatory of the GWWC pledge.
Many early and senior employees identify as effective altruists and/or previously worked for EA organisations
Anthropic has a "Long-Term Benefit Trust" which, in theory, can exercise significant control over the company. The current members are:
- Zach Robinson - CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
- Neil Buddy Shah - CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, former Managing Director at GiveWell and speaker at multiple EA Global conferences
- Kanika Bahl - CEO of Evidence Action, a long-term grantee of GiveWell.
Three of EA’s largest funders historically (Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried and Jann Tallinn) were early investors in Anthropic.
Anthropic has hired a "model welfare lead" and seems to be the company most concerned about AI sentience, an issue that's discussed little outside of EA circles.
On the Future of Life podcast, Daniela said, "I think since we [Dario and her] were very, very small, we've always had this special bond around really wanting to make the world better or wanting to help people" and "he [Dario] was actually a very early GiveWell fan I think in 2007 or 2008."
The Anthropic co-founders have apparently made a pledge to donate 80% of their Anthropic equity (mentioned in passing during a conversation between them here and discussed more here)
Their first company value states, "We strive to make decisions that maximize positive outcomes for humanity in the long run."

It's perfectly fine if Daniela and Dario choose not to personally identify with EA (despite having lots of associations) and I'm not suggesting that Anthropic needs to brand itself as an EA organisation. But I think it’s dishonest to suggest there aren’t strong ties between Anthropic and the EA community. When asked, they could simply say something like, "yes, many people at Anthropic are motivated by EA principles."

It appears that Anthropic has made a communications decision to distance itself from the EA community, likely because of negative associations the EA brand has in some circles. It's not clear to me that this is even in their immediate self-interest. I think it’s a bad look to be so evasive about things that can be easily verified (as evidenced by the twitter response).

This also personally makes me trust them less to act honestly in the future when the stakes are higher. Many people regard Anthropic as the most responsible frontier AI company. And it seems like something they genuinely care about—they invest a ton in AI safety, security and governance. Honest and straightforward communication seems important to maintain this trust.

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Ben_West🔸Mar 31*98

I'm sympathetic to wanting to keep your identity small, particularly if you think the person asking about your identity is a journalist writing a hit piece, but if everyone takes funding, staff, etc. from the EA commons and don't share that they got value from that commons, the commons will predictably be under-supported in the future.

I hope Anthropic leadership can find a way to share what they do and don't get out of EA (e.g. in comments here).

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Apr 2*59

I'm a proud EA.

Angelina Li

Apr 3

FWIW, I appreciated reading this :) Thank you for sharing it! I so agree! I think there is something virtuous and collaborative for those of us who have benefited from EA and its ideas / community to just... being willing to stand up and say simply that. I think these ideas are worth fighting for. <3

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

Apr 2

On this note, I'm happy that in CEA's new post, they talk about building the brand of effective altruism

RavenclawPrefectApr 136

Note that much of the strongest opposition to Anthropic is also associated with EA, so it's not obvious that the EA community has been an uncomplicated good for the company, though I think it likely has been fairly helpful on net (especially if one measures EA's contribution to Anthropic's mission of making transformative AI go well for the world rather than its contribution to the company's bottom line). I do think it would be better if Anthropic comms were less evasive about the degree of their entanglement with EA.

(I work at Anthropic, though I don't claim any particular insight into the views of the cofounders. For my part I'll say that I identify as an EA, know many other employees who do, get enormous amounts of value from the EA community, and think Anthropic is vastly more EA-flavored than almost any other large company, though it is vastly less EA-flavored than, like, actual EA orgs. I think the quotes in the paragraph of the Wired article give a pretty misleading picture of Anthropic when taken in isolation and I wouldn't personally have said them, but I think "a journalist goes through your public statements looking for the most damning or hypocritical things you've ever said out of context" is an incredibly tricky situation to come out of looking good and many of the comments here seem a bit uncharitable given that.)

Ben_West🔸

Apr 1

My guess is that the people quoted in this article would be sad if e.g. 80k started telling people not to work at Anthropic. But maybe I'm wrong - would be good to know if so! (And also yes, "people having unreasonably high expectations for epistemics in published work" is definitely a cost of dealing with EAs!)

RavenclawPrefect

Apr 1

Oh, definitely agreed - I think effects like "EA counterfactually causes a person to work at Anthropic" are straightforwardly good for Anthropic. Almost all of the sources of bad-for-Anthropic effects from EA I expect come from people who have never worked there. (Though again, I think even the all-things-considered effect of EA has been substantially positive for the company, and I agree that it would probably be virtue-ethically better for Anthropic to express more of the value they've gotten from that commons.)

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸Mar 31*17

Edit: the comment above has been edited, the below was a reply to a previous version and it makes less sense now, leaving it for posterity

You know much more than I do, but I'm surprised by this take. My sense is that Anthropic is giving a lot back:

funding

My understanding is that all early investors in Anthropic made a ton of money, it's plausible that Moskovitz made as much money by investing in Anthropic as by founding Asana. (Of course this is all paper money for now, but I think they could sell it for billions).

As mentioned in this post, co-founders also pledged to donate 80% of their equity, which seems to imply they'll give much more funding than they got. (Of course in EV, it could still go to zero)

staff

I don't see why hiring people is more "taking" than "giving", especially if the hires get to work on things that they believe are better for the world than any other role they could work on

and doesn't contribute anything back

My sense is that (even ignoring funding mentioned above) they are giving a ton back in terms of research on alignment, interpretability, model welfare, and general AI Safety work

To be clear, I don't know if Anthropic is net-positive for the world, bu... (read more)

Ben_West🔸Mar 3117

Great points, I don't want to imply that they contribute nothing back, I will think about how to reword my comment.

I do think 1) community goods are undersupplied relative to some optimum, 2) this is in part because people aren't aware how useful those goods are to orgs like Anthropic, and 3) that in turn is partially downstream of messaging like what OP is critiquing.

Ozzie GooenApr 612

I want to flag that the EA-aligned equity from Anthropic might well be worth $5-$30B+, and their power in Anthropic could be worth more (in terms of shaping AI and AI safety).

So on the whole, I'm mostly hopeful that they do good things with those two factors. It seems quite possible to me that they have more power and ability now than the rest of EA combined.

That's not to say I'm particularly optimistic. Just that I'm really not focused on their PR/coms related to EA right now; I'd ideally just keep focused on those two things - meaning I'd encourage them to focus on those, and to the extent that other EAs could apply support/pressure, I'd encourage other EAs to focus on these two.

Jason

Apr 6

Now that you mention this, I think it's worth flagging the conflict of interest between EA and Anthropic that it poses. Although it's a little awkward to ascribe conflicts of interest to movements, I think a belief that ideological allies hold vast amounts of wealth in a specific company -- especially combined with a hope that such allies will use said wealth to further the movement's objectives -- qualifies. There are a couple of layers to that. First, there's a concern that the financial entanglement with Anthropic could influence EA actors, such as by pulling punches on Anthropic, punching extra-hard on OpenAI, or shading policy proposals in Anthropic's favor. Relatedly, people may hesitate to criticize Anthropic (or make policy proposals hostile to it) because their actual or potential funders have Anthropic entanglements, whether or not the funders would actually act in a conflicted manner. By analogy, I don't see EA as a credible source on the virtues and drawbacks of crypto or Asana. The difference is that neither crypto nor management software are EA cause areas, so those conflicts are less likely to impinge on core EA work than the conflict regarding Anthropic. The next layer is that a reasonable observer would discount some EA actions and proposals based on the COI. To a somewhat informed member of the general public or a policymaker, I think establishing the financial COI creates a burden shift, under which EA bears an affirmative burden of establishing that its actions and proposals are free of taint. That's a hard burden to meet in a highly technical and fast-developing field. And some powerful entities (e.g., OpenAI) would be incentivized to hammer on the COI if people start listening to EA more. I'm not sure how to mitigate this COI, although some sort of firewall between funders with Anthropic entanglements and grantmakers might help some. (In this particular case, how Anthropic communicates about EA is more a meta concern, and so I don't feel t

MjreardMar 30*84

There's a lesson here for everyone in/around EA, which is why I sent the pictured tweet: it is very counterproductive to downplay what or who you know for strategic or especially "optics" reasons. The best optics are honesty, earnestness, and candor. If you have explain and justify why your statements that are perceived as evasive and dishonest are in fact okay, you probably did a lot worse than you could have on these fronts.

Also, on the object level, for the love of God, no one cares about EA except EAs and some obviously bad faith critics trying to tar you with guilt-by-association. Don't accept their premise and play into their narrative by being evasive like this. *This validates the criticisms and makes you look worse in everyone's eyes than just saying you're EA or you think it's great or whatever.*

But what if I'm really not EA anymore? Honesty requires that you at least acknowledge that you *were.* Bonus points for explaining what changed. If your personal definition of EA changed over that time, that's worth pondering and disclosing as well.

Neel NandaMar 3151

no one cares about EA except EAs and some obviously bad faith critics trying to tar you with guilt-by-association

I agree with your broad points, but this seems false to me. I think that lots of people seem to have negative associations with EA, especially given SBF and in the AI and tech space where eg it's widely (and imo falsely) believed that the openai coup was for EA reasons

MjreardMar 3111

I overstated this, but disagree. Overall very few people have ever heard of EA. In tech, maybe you get up to ~20% recognition, but even there, the amount of headspace people give it is very small and you should act as though this is the case. I agree it's negative directionally, but evasive comments like these are actually a big part of how we got to this point.

Neel NandaMar 3113

I'm specifically claiming silicon valley AI, where I think it's a fair bit higher?

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Mar 3110

I think we feel this more than is the case. I think a lot of people know about it but don't have much of an opinion on it, similar to how I feel about NASCAR or something.

I recently caught up with a friend who worked at OpenAI until very recently and he thought it was good that I was part of EA and what I did since college.

David Mathers🔸

Apr 1

"widely (and imo falsely) believed that the openai coup was for EA reasons" False why?

Neel NandaApr 120

Because Sam was engaging in a bunch of highly inappropriate behaviour for a CEO like lying to the board which is sufficient to justify the board firing him without need for more complex explanations. And this matches private gossip I've heard, and the board's public statements

Further, Adam d'Angelo is not, to my knowledge, an EA/AI safety person, but also voted to remove Sam and was a necessary vote, which is strong evidence there were more legit reasons

Matrice Jacobine

Apr 2

The "highly inappropriate behavior" is question was nearly entirely about violating safety protocols, and by the time Murati and Sutskever defected to Altman's side the conflict was clearly considered by both sides to be a referendum on EA and AI safety, to the point of the board seeking to nominate rationalist Emmett Shear as Altman's replacement.

Neel Nanda

Apr 2

I don't think the board's side considered it a referendum. Just because the inappropriate behaviour was about safety doesn't mean that a high integrity board member who is not safety focused shouldn't fire them!

Matrice Jacobine

Apr 3

It doesn't matter what you think they should have done, the fact is, Murati and Sutskever defected to Altman's side after initially backing his firing, almost certainly because the consensus discourse quickly became focused on EA and AI safety and not the object-level accusations of inappropriate behavior.

Oscar Sykes

Apr 1

Ilya too!

NickLaingMar 31*71

I'm a bit confused about people suggesting this is defendable.

"I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term".

There are three statements here

1. I'm not the expert on effective altruism - Its hard to see this as anything other than a lie. She's married to Holden Karnofsky and knows ALL about Effective Altruism. She would probably destroy me on a "Do you understand EA" quiz.... I wonder how @Holden Karnofsky feels about this?

2. I don't identify with that terminology. - yes true at least now! Maybe she's still got some residual warmth for us deep in her heart?

3. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term". - Her husband set up 2 of the biggest EA (or heavily EA based) institutions that are still going strong today. On what planet is it an "outdated" term? Perhaps on the planet where your main goal is growing and defending your company?

In addition to the clear associations from the OP, from Their wedding page 2017 seemingly written by Daniela "We are both excited about effective altruism: using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, ... (read more)

David Mathers🔸Apr 143

Everything you say is correct I think, but I think in more normal circles, pointing out the inconsistency between someone's wedding page and their corporate PR bullshit would seem a bit weird and obsessive and mean. I don't find it so, but I think ordinary people would get a bad vibe from it.

NickLaing

Apr 1

That's interesting I think I might move in different circles. Most people I know would not really understand the concept of there being a PR world where your present different things from your personal life Perhaps you move in more corporate or higher flying circles where this kind of disconnect is normal and where its fine to have a public/private communication disconnect which is considered rude to challenge? Interesting!

Ben_West🔸Apr 318

fwiw I think in any circle I've been a part of critiquing someone publicly based on their wedding website would be considered weird/a low blow. (Including corporate circles.) ^[1]

^{^}
I think there is a level of influence at which everything becomes fair game, e.g. Donald Trump can't really expect a public/private communication disconnect. I don't think that's true of Daniela, although I concede that her influence over the light cone might not actually be that much lower than Trump's.

D0TheMathApr 513

There's already been much critique of your argument here, but I will just say that by the "level of influence" metric, Daniela shoots it out of the park compared to Donald Trump. I think it is entirely uncontroversial and perhaps an understatement to claim the world as a whole and EA in particular has a right to know & discuss pretty much every fact about the personal, professional, social, and philosophical lives of the group of people who, by their own admission, are literally creating God. And are likely to be elevated to a permanent place of power & control over the universe for all of eternity.

Such a position should not be a pleasurable job with no repercussions on the level of privacy or degree of public scrutiny on your personal life. If you are among this group, and this level of scrutiny disturbs you, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to "reshape the lightcone without public consent" or knowledge.

NickLaingApr 314

Wow again I just haven't moved in circles where this would even be considered. Only the most elite 0.1 percent of people can even have a meaningful "public private disconnect" as you have to have quite a prominent public profile for that to even be an issue. Although we all have a "public profile" in theory, very few people are famous/powerful enough for it to count.

I don't think I believe in a public/private disconnect but I'll think about it some more. I believe in integrity and honesty in most situations, especially when your are publicly disparaging a movement. If you have chosen to lie and smear a movement with"My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term" then I think this makes what you say a bit more fair game than for other statements where you aren't low-key attacking a group of well meaning people.

Ben_West🔸Apr 315

Only the most elite 0.1 percent of people can even have a meaningful "public private disconnect" as you have to have quite a prominent public profile for that to even be an issue.

Hmm yeah, that's kinda my point? Like complaining about your annoying coworker anonymously online is fine, but making a public blog post like "my coworker Jane Doe sucks for these reasons" would be weird, people get fired for stuff like that. And referencing their wedding website would be even more extreme.

(Of course, most people's coworkers aren't trying to reshape the lightcone without public consent so idk, maybe different standards should apply here. I can tell you that a non-trivial number of people I've wanted to hire for leadership positions in EA have declined for reasons like "I don't want people critiquing my personal life on the EA Forum" though.)

RebeccaApr 313

No one is critiquing Daniela’s personal life though, they’re critiquing something about her public life (ie her voluntary public statements to journalists) for contradicting what she’s said in her personal life. Compare this with a common reason people get cancelled where the critique is that there’s something bad in their personal life, and people are disappointed that the personal life doesn’t reflect the public persona- in this case it’s the other way around.

Henry Stanley 🔸

Apr 7

Exactly. Daniela and the senior leadership at one of the frontier AI labs are not the same as someone's random office colleague. There's a clear public interest angle here in terms of understanding the political and social affiliations of powerful and influential people - which is simply absent in the case you describe.

NickLaing

Apr 3

That's interesting and I'm sad to hear about people declining jobs due those reasons. On the other hand though some leadership jobs might not be the right job fit if they're not up for that kind of critique. I would imagine though there are a bunch of ways to avoid the "EA limelight" for many positions though, of course not public facing ones. Slight quibble though I would consider "Jane Doe sucks for these reasons" an order of magnitude more objectionable than quoting a wedding website to make a point. Maybe wedding website are sacrosanct in a way in missing tho...

Ben_West🔸Apr 310

the other hand though some leadership jobs might not be the right job fit if they're not up for that kind of critique

Yeah, this used to be my take but a few iterations of trying to hire for jobs which exclude shy awkward nerds from consideration when the EA candidate pool consists almost entirely of shy awkward nerds has made the cost of this approach quite salient to me.

There are trade-offs to everything 🤷‍♂️

Howie_Lempel

Apr 6

Agree with Ben that this makes it harder to find folks for leadership positions. In addition to excluding shy awkward nerds, you're also actively selecting for a bunch of personality traits, not all of which are unalloyed positives. By analogy, I think there's a very strong argument that very high levels of scrutiny are fair game for politicians but I'm not particularly thrilled with what that does to our candidate pool. (I don't know of a great way to resolve this tension.)

NickLaing

Apr 3

100 percent man

Jason

Apr 3

I agree with this being weird / a low blow in general, but not in this particular case. The crux with your footnote may be that I see this as more than a continuum. I think someone's interest in private communications becomes significantly weaker as they assume a position of great power over others, conditioned on the subject matter of the communication being a matter of meaningful public interest. Here, I think an AI executive's perspective on EA is a matter of significant public interest. Second, I do not find a wedding website to be a particularly private form of communication compared to (e.g.) a private conversation with a romantic partner. Audience in the hundreds, no strong confidentiality commitment, no precautions to prevent public access. The more power the individual has over others, the wider the scope of topics that are of legitimate public interest for the others to bring up and the narrower the scope of communications that citing would be a weird / low. So what applies to major corporate CEOs with significant influence over the future would not generally apply to most people. Compare this to paparazzi, who hound celebrities (who do not possess CEO-level power) for material that is not of legitimate public interest, and often under circumstances in which society recognizes particularly strong privacy rights. I'm reminded of the NBA basketball-team owner who made some racist basketball-related comments to his affair partner, who leaked them. My recollection is that people threw shade on the affair partner (who arguably betrayed his confidences), but few people complained about showering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax consequences on the owner by forcing the sale of his team against his will. Unlike comments to a medium-size audience on a website, the owner's comments were particularly private (to an intimate figure, 1:1, protected from non-consensual recording by criminal law).

David Mathers🔸

Apr 1

No, I don't move in corporate circles.

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸

Apr 5

Not when the issue is "knowledge of and identification with something by name"

BuckApr 137

I think you shouldn't assume that people are "experts" on something just because they're married to someone who is an expert, even when (like Daniela) they're smart and successful.

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸

Apr 5

Well it's not really an assumption, is it? We have very good reason to think she's downplaying her knowledge.

Lukas_GloorApr 1*25

I agree that these statements are not defensible. I'm sad to see it. There's maybe some hope that the person making these statements was just caught off guard and it's not a common pattern at Antrhopic to obfuscate things with that sort of misdirection. (Edit: Or maybe the journalist was fishing for quotes and made it seem like they were being more evasive than they actually were.)

I don't get why they can't just admit that Anthropic's history is pretty intertwined with EA history. They could still distance themselves from "EA as the general public perceives it" or even "EA-as-it-is-now."

For instance, they could flag that EA maybe has a bit of a problem with "purism" -- like, some vocal EAs in this comment section and elsewhere seem to think it is super obvious that Anthropic has been selling out/became too much of a typical for-profit corporation. I didn't myself think that this was necessarily the case because I see a lot of valid tradeoffs that Anthropic leadership is having to navigate, and the armchair quarterbacks EAs seem to be failing to take that into account? However, the communications highlighted in the OP made me update that Anthropic leadership probably does lack the integrity needed to do complicated power-seeking stuff that has the potential to corrupt. (If someone can handle the temptions from power, they should at the very least be able to handle the comparatively easy dynamics of don't willingly distort the truth as you know it.)

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️

Apr 1

Yes. It's sad to see, but Anthropic is going the same way as OpenAI, despite being founded by a group that split from OpenAI over safety concerns. Power (and money) corrupts. How long until another group splits from Anthropic and the process repeats? Or actually, one can hope that such a group splitting from Anthropic might actually have integrity and instead work on trying to stop the race.

Jason

Apr 7

What surprises me about this whole situation is that people seem surprised at the executive leadership at a corporation worth an estimated $61.5B would engage in big-corporation PR-speak. The base rate for big-corporation execs engaging in such conduct in their official capacities seems awfully close to 100%. Hence, it does not feel like anything to update on for me. I'm getting the sense that a decent number of people assume that being "EA aligned" is somehow a strong inoculant against the temptations of money and power. Arguably the FTX scandal -- which after all involved multiple EAs, not just SBF -- should have already caused people to update on how effective said inoculant is, at least when billions of dollars were floating around.[1] 1. ^ This is not to suggest that most EAs would act in fraudulent ways if surrounded by billions of dollars, but it does provide evidence that EAs are not super-especially resistant to the corrosive effects of money and power at that level of concentration. FTX was only one cluster of people, but how many people have been EAs first and then been exposed to the amount of money/power that FTX or Anthropic had/have?

Lukas_Gloor

Apr 14

(I know I'm late again replying to this thread.) Hm, good point. This gives me pause, but I'm not sure what direction to update in. Like, maybe I should update "corporate speak is just what these large orgs do and it's more like a fashion thing than a signal of their (lack of) integrity on things that matter most." Or maybe I should update in the direction you suggest, namely "if an org grows too much, it's unlikely to stay aligned with its founding character principles." I would have certainly thought so. If anything can be an inoculant against those temptations, surely a strong adherence to a cause greater than oneself packaged in lots warnings against biases and other ways humans can go wrong (as is the common message in EA and rationalist circles) seems like the best hope for it? If you don't think it can be a strong inoculant, that makes you pretty cynical, no? (I think cynicism is often right, so this isn't automatically a rejection of your position. I just want to flag that yours is a claim with quite strong implications on its own.) If you were just talking about SBF, then I'd say your point is weak because he probably wasn't low on dark triad traits to start out with. But you emphasizing how other EAs around him were also involved (the direct co-conspirators at Alameda and FTX) is a strong point. Still, in my mind this would probably have gone very differently with the same group of people minus SBF and with a leader with a stronger commitment and psychological disposition towards honesty. (I should flag that parts of Caroline Ellison's blog also gave me vibes of "seems to like having power too much" -- but at least it's more common for young people to later change/grow.) That's why I don't consider it a huge update for "power corrupts". To me, it's a reinforcement of "it matters to have good leadership." My worldview(?) is that "power corrupts" doesn't apply equally to every leader and that we'd be admitting defeat straight away if we stopped trying

JasonApr 1620

When I speak of a strong inoculant, I mean something that is very effective in preventing the harm in question -- such as the measles vaccine. Unless there were a measles case at my son's daycare, or a family member were extremely vulnerable to measles, the protection provided by the strong inoculant is enough that I can carry on with life without thinking about measles.

In contrast, the influenza vaccine is a weak inoculant -- I definitely get vaccinated because I'll get infected less and hospitalized less without it. But I'm not surprised when I get the flu. If I were at great risk of serious complications from the flu, then I'd only use vaccination as one layer of my mitigation strategy (and without placing undue reliance on it.) And of course there are strengths in between those two.

I'd call myself moderately cynical. I think history teaches us that the corrupting influence of power is strong and that managing this risk has been a struggle. I don't think I need to take the position that no strong inoculant exists. It is enough to assert that -- based on centuries of human experience across cultures -- our starting point should be that inoculants as weak until proven otherw... (read more)

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸

Apr 7

Are you saying bc it's not "surprising" it should be allowed? This rhetorical move of shaming your opponent for not having already gotten used to and therefore tolerating someone doing bad things I always find bizarre.

Jason

Apr 7

No -- that something is unsurprising, even readily predictable, does not imply anything about whether it is OK. The fact that people seem surprised by the presence of corpspeak here does make me concerned that they may have been looking at the world with an assumption that "aligned" people are particularly resistant to the corrosive effects of money and power. That, in my opinion, is a dangerous assumption to make -- and is not one I would find well-supported by the available evidence. Our models of the world should assume that at least the significant majority of people will be adversely and materially influenced by exposure to high concentrations of money and power, and we need to plan accordingly.

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸

Apr 7

Convincing such people that Anthropic is doing corpspeak and not just being perfectly reasonable or justified by 3D chess (with ultimate EA goals) would be a lot of progress... It's a huge problem in EA that people don't take CoI that seriously as something that affect their thinking. They think they can solve every problem explicitly intellectually so corruption by money won't happen to them.

David_Althaus

Apr 1

Not sure if I misunderstand something but the wedding page seems from 2017? (It reads "October 21, 2017" at the top.)

NickLaing

Apr 1

Apologies corrected

-12

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️

Mar 31

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸Mar 3055

I think the people in the article you quote are being honest about not identifying with the EA social community, and the EA community on X is being weird about this.

I think the confusion might stem from interpreting EA as "self-identifying with a specific social community" (which they claim they don't, at least not anymore) vs EA as "wanting to do good and caring about others" (which they claim they do, and always did)

Going point by point:

Dario, Anthropic’s CEO, was the 43rd signatory of the Giving What We Can pledge and wrote a guest post for the GiveWell blog. He also lived in a group house with Holden Karnofsky and Paul Christiano at a time when Paul and Dario were technical advisors to Open Philanthropy.

This was more than 10 years ago. EA was a very different concept / community at the time, and this is consistent with Daniela Amodei saying that she considers it an "outdated term"

Amanda Askell was the 67th signatory of the GWWC pledge.

This was also more than 10 years ago, and giving to charity is not unique to EA. Many early pledgers don't consider themselves EA (e.g. signatory #46 claims it got too stupid for him years ago)

Many early and senior employees iden

... (read more)

burner2Mar 3042

The point I was trying to make is, separate from whether these statements are literally false, they give a misleading impression to the reader. If I didn't know anything about Anthropic and I read the words “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it's not a theme of the organization or anything”, I might think Anthropic is like Google where you may occasionally meet people in the cafeteria who happen to be effective altruists but EA really has nothing to do with the organisation. I would not get the impression that many of the employees are EAs who work at Anthropic or work on AI safety for EA reasons. And that the three members of the trust they've given veto power over the company to have been heavily involved in EA.

I also think being weird and evasive about this isn't a good communication strategy (for reasons @Mjreard discusses above).

As a side point, I'm confused when you say:

I don't think they suggest that, depending on your definition of "strong". Just above the sceenshotted quote, the article mentions that many early investors were at the time linked to EA.

That was said by the author of the article who was trying to make the point that there is a link between Anthropic and EA. So I don't see this as evidence of Anthropic being forthcoming.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

Mar 30

I think in the context of the article, their quotes (44 words in total) make more sense: In that context, the quotes clarify that Anthropic is not an "EA company", and give a more accurate understanding of the relationship to the reader. A more in-depth analysis of the historical affiliations, separations, agreements, and disagreements of Anthropic's funders, founders, and employees with various parts of EA over the past 15 years would take far more than two paragraphs. You wouldn't think that in the context of the article, though. I don't know what percentage of Anthropic employees consider themselves part of the EA community. Also, I don't agree that it's clear that Evidence Action's CEO is part of the effective altruism community because evidence action received money from GiveWell. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanika-bahl-091a936/details/experience/ She was working in global health since before effective altruism was a thing, and many/most people funded by OpenPhilanthropy don't consider themselves part of the community. In the same way that charities funded by Catholic donors are not necessarily Catholic. It does seem that OpenPhilanthropy was their main source of funding for many years though, which makes the link stronger than I originally thought.

Lukas_GloorApr 321

I think the people in the article you quote are being honest about not identifying with the EA social community, and the EA community on X is being weird about this.

I never interpreted that to be the crux/problem here. (I know I'm late replying to this.)

People can change what they identify as. For me, what looks shady in their responses is the clusmy attempts at downplaying their past association with EA.

I don't care about it because I still identify with EA; instead, I care because it goes under "not being consistently candid." (I quite like that expression despite its unfortunate history). I'd be equally annoyed if they downplayed some significant other thing unrelated to EA.

Sure, you might say it's fine not being consistently candid with journalists. They may quote you out of context. Pretty common advice for talking to journalists is to keep your statements as short and general as possible, esp. when they ask you things that aren't "on message." Probably they were just trying to avoid actually-unfair bad press here? Still, it's clumsy and ineffective. It backfired. Being candid would probably have been better here even from the perspective of preventing journalists from spinning this against them. Also, they could just decide not to talk to untrusted journalists?

More generally, I feel like we really need leaders who can build trust and talk openly about difficult tradeoffs and realities.

David Mathers🔸Apr 319

Just as a side point, I do not think Amanda's past relationship with EA can accurately be characterized as much like Jonathan Blow, unless he was far more involved than just being an early GWWC pledge signatory, which I think is unlikely. It's not just that Amanda was, as the article says, once married to Will. She wrote her doctoral thesis on an EA topic, how to deal with infinities in ethics: https://askell.io/files/Askell-PhD-Thesis.pdf Then she went to work in AI for what I think is overwhelmingly likely to be EA reasons (though I admit I don't have any direct evidence to that effect) , given that it was in 2018 before the current excitement about generative AI, and relatively few philosophy PhDs, especially those who could fairly easily have gotten good philosophy jobs, made that transition. She wasn't a public figure back then, but I'd be genuinely shocked to find out she didn't have an at least mildly significant behind the scenes effect through conversation (not just with Will) on the early development of EA ideas.

Not that I'm accusing her of dishonesty here or anything: she didn't say that she wasn't EA or that she had never been EA, just that Anthropic wasn't an EA org. Indeed, given that I just checked and she still mentions being a GWWC member prominently on her website, and she works on AI alignment and wrote a thesis on a weird, longtermism-coded topic, I am somewhat skeptical that she is trying to personally distance from EA: https://askell.io/

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸

Apr 5

I'm sorry to say this because I like you and your comments, but you have a history of apologetics for Anthropic, Lorenzo. This is "do I have to believe it?" rather than "does this evidence suggest it?" thinking. They are simply not being forthright about the deep extent of the relationship between Anthropic and EA this whole time. They want people to think the connection is less than it was or is.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

Apr 6

I'm very surprised by this and by the many strong votes and agree votes, I don't know much about Anthropic and I don't write much about Anthropic. Is it possible that you're confusing me with someone else? You can see all my EA Forum comments and tweets mentioning "Anthropic" here and here.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

Apr 6

This whole thing is about two quotes with 44 words in total, which really don't seem to me to be false or misleading. Based on the little information I have, in the context of the article, I think they make the representation of the relationship closer to what I think is true, and consistent with previous messaging from them. Of course I could be wrong and Askell and Amodei could secretly mostly have EA friends, go to EA parties, secretly self-identify with the community, etc. but I don't think there's public evidence to suggest that.

DavidmanheimApr 1*10

You seem to have ignored a central part of what was said by Daniela Amodei; "I'm not the expert on effective altruism," which seems hard to defend.

Edit to add: the above proof that signing on to the GWWC pledge doesn't mean you are an EA is correct, but the person you link to is using having signed as a proof that he understands what EA is.

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ Mar 3129

It appears that Anthropic has made a communications decision to distance itself from the EA community, likely because of negative associations the EA brand has in some circles.

This works both ways. EA should be distancing itself from Anthropic, given recent pronouncements by Dario about racing China and initiating recursive self-improvement. Not to mention their pushing of the capabilities frontier.

Davidmanheim

Apr 1

As always, and as I've said in other cases, I.don't think it makes sense to ask a disparate movement to make pronouncements like this.

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ Apr 110

No, but the main orgs in EA can still act in this regard. E.g. Anthropic shouldn't be welcome at EAG events. They shouldn't have their jobs listed on 80k. They shouldn't be collaborated with on research projects etc that allow them to "safety wash" their brand. In fact, they should be actively opposed and protested (as PauseAI have done).

conflictaverseApr 106

I kind of wish we could do a reader poll as to community opinion on (1) whether these things are lies and (2) why they think they said these things. I can't tell if I'm really poorly calibrated when I read some of the comments here or if the commenters are a non-representative sample.

Dylan RichardsonMar 3010

Giving this an "insightful" because I appreciate the documentation of what is indeed a surprisingly close relationship with EA. But also a disagree because it seems reasonable to be skittish around the subject ("AI Safety" broadly defined is the relevant focus, adding more would just set-off an unnecessary news media firestorm).

Plus, I'm not convinced that Anthropic has actually engaged in outright deception or obfuscation. This seems like a single slightly odd sentence by Daniela, nothing else.

Yarrow

Apr 7

Doesn’t this amount to an argument that the leaders at Anthropic should say whatever they think sounds good, rather than what’s true? I think you have a good point there. When people are speaking off the cuff (like in an interview setting) people often misspeak or express themselves unclearly. If I saw multiple instances of Daniela Amodei saying similar things, then it would look a lot more like just straight-up dishonesty. As is, it’s hard to tell. Now that you’ve raised this point, the post of this title feels dishonest. The title "Anthropic is not being consistently candid about their connection to EA" suggests a pattern. The post does not show a pattern.

Karthik Tadepalli

Apr 7

For what it's worth "not consistently candid" is definitely a joke about the OpenAI board saying that Sam altman was "not consistently candid" with them rather than a statement of context.

Yarrow

Apr 7

Oh, you’re right, I forgot about that. But then the body of the post makes a non-joking claim that agrees with the joke: So, is the title a joke or not? Maybe it’s a joke-y reference but the point it’s trying to make is actually sincere and not a joke. Extrapolating from these somewhat ambiguous, somewhat open to interpretation off the cuff comments to "a communications decision" just seems like jumping to conclusions. And that’s disappointing because I was so excited to be mad!

Karthik Tadepalli

Apr 7

I think the phrasing is probably a joke but the substance is the same as the post

Dylan Richardson

Apr 7

No; it's best if individuals are truthful. But presidents of companies aren't just individuals, does that mean they should lie? Still no. It just means that they should be limited with who and what they associate with. I mentioned an " unnecessary news media firestorm", but the issue is much broader. Anthropic is a private corporation, its fidelity is to its shareholders. "Public Benefit" corporation aside, it is a far different entity than any EA non-profit. I'm not an expert, but I think that history shows that it is almost always a bad idea for private companies to claim allegiance to anything but the most anodyne social goals. It's bad for the company and bad for the espoused social goals or movement. I'm very much pro-cause neutrality in EA; the idea that a charity might all the sudden realize it's not effective enough, choose to shut down and divert all resources elsewhere, awesome! Private companies can't do this. Even a little bit of doing this is antithetical to the incentive structure they face. As for your second response, I agree 100%.

Yarrow

Apr 7

Are you saying if she told the truth it would risk causing a media firestorm? If so, isn’t what you’re saying an endorsement of dishonesty? If not, then what was the point of what you said originally?

Dylan Richardson

Apr 7

No. Just deflect, which admittedly, is difficult to do, but CEOs do it all the time. Ideally she should have been clear about her own personal relationship with EA, but then moved on. Insofar as she was (or seemed) dishonest here, it didn't help; the wired article is proof of that. It's hard to pin-point a clear line not to cross, but something like "this is an EA company" would be one, as would "we are guided by the values of the EA movement".

Yarrow

Apr 7

So, you're advocating not telling the truth but also not lying by avoiding the question.

Dylan Richardson

Apr 7

Sort of. But claiming that you are an EA organization is at least 80% of what makes you one in the eyes of the public, as well as much of self-identification among employees. Ex: There's a big difference between a company that happens to be full of Mormons and a company that is full of Mormons that calls itself "a Mormon company".

Yarrow

Apr 7

The Wired article doesn't say what exactly the question was. I doubt the question was "Is Anthropic an effective altruist company?".

Dylan Richardson

Apr 7

True. Yeah I'm sketching out a story about the background mechanics here that I think is plausible enough to partly under-cut the premise of this post; but the real bottom line is that this is just a single out-of-context sentence. Mountains out of mole hills.

quinnApr 26

I think "outdated term" is a power move, trying to say you're a "geek" to separate yourself from the "mops" and "sociopaths". She could genuinely think, or be surrounded by people who think, 2nd wave or 3rd wave EA (i.e. us here on the forum in 2025) are lame, and that the real EA was some older thing that had died.

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ Apr 44

Re Anthropic and (unpopular) parallels to FTX, just thinking that it's pretty remarkable that no one has brought up the fact that SBF, Caroline Ellison and FTX were major funders of Anthropic. Arguably Anthropic wouldn't be where they are today without their help! It's unfortunate the journalist didn't press them on this.

Cullen 🔸

Apr 5

Is your claim that somehow FTX investing in Anthropic has caused Anthropic to be FTX-like in the relevant ways? That seems implausible.

Greg_Colbourn ⏸️

Apr 7

No, just saying that without their massive injection of cash, Anthropic might not be where they are today. I think the counterfactual where there wasn't any "EA" investment into Anthropic would be significantly slower growth of the company (and, arguably, one fewer frontier AI company today).

Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸Apr 52

Thank you for writing this. The comment section is all the evidence you need that EAs need to hear this and not be allowed to excuse Anthropic. It's worse than I thought, honestly, seeing the pages of apologetics here over whether this is technically dishonest.