{"id":602558,"date":"2026-09-16T21:44:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T21:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/602558\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T21:44:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T21:44:20","slug":"meet-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodeis-handpicked-super-woke-globalists-he-thinks-will-save-us-from-an-ai-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/602558\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s handpicked super-woke globalists he thinks will save us from an AI apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Worried what AI will do to the world? Don\u2019t fret \u2014 we got a group of woke elitists who will protect us.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the pitch from Anthropic\u2019s CEO Dario Amodei, who says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn\u2019t destroy the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote \u201cEffective Altruism,\u201d that believe all the world\u2019s problems can be solved with technology.<\/p>\n

In a bombshell essay titled \u201cWe Must Pace the Frontier,\u201d<\/a> Amodei argued that leading AI firms should commit to allowing \u201cembedded third-party evaluators\u201d from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, that would maintain \u201cemployee-like access\u201d to oversee safety efforts and ensure advanced AI models don\u2019t turn Terminator and wipe out humanity.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s biggest early investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei argues for third-party AI reviewers from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research. REUTERS<\/p>\n

Effective Altruism, a philosophy that\u2019s become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe, advocates for using reason \u2014 and fortunes amassed by tech\u2019s best and brightest \u2014 to do the most good for humanity over the long term.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Deep EA ties<\/p>\n

The overlap between METR and Anthropic is rife with potential conflicts of interest, according to critics. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s housemate, coworker and research collaborator in the 2010s when they were both at OpenAI \u2014 Anthropic\u2019s biggest rival.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ajeya Cotra is a member of technical staff at METR. METR<\/p>\n

Christiano also served as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic\u2019s Long-Term Benefit Trust.<\/p>\n

One staffer on METR is Ajeya Cotra, who is married to Christiano and has been a major organizer in the EA world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The founder and CEO of the group is Beth Barnes, who was hired by Christiano and was involved in the EA movement at college.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chief scientist Hjalmar Wijk and staffers Megan Kinniment and Pip Arnott all came from the same research cluster at the University of Oxford \u2014 a major feeder for EA.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re required to disclose conflicts of interest, such as employees holding equity in firms they are tapped to investigate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t 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 \u2013 external investigators can help bring more information to light,\u201d a METR spokesperson said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beth Barnes is the CEO of METR. METR<\/p>\n

\u201cOur funders have no say in the projects we work on and we do not accept any funding from AI companies or their employees.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

METR\u2019s 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 \u201cdoomers\u201d who argue the technology is on the precipice of disaster.<\/p>\n

\u201cMETR is essentially Anthropic in another form,\u201d a source familiar with the White House\u2019s thinking told The Post on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Amodei, left, speaks with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during the keynote address at Salesforce\u2019s Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on Tuesday. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Multimillion-dollar fundraising<\/p>\n

Effective Altruism\u2019s obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since its founding, METR and its affiliates have received funding from EA kingpins like Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn \u2014 both of whom are Anthropic investors.<\/p>\n

In August, METR announced it had raised $71 million in new funding from outside investors over the previous six months.<\/p>\n

Tallinn\u2019s Survival and Flourishing Fund, a philanthropy group, has earmarked up to $752,000 in funding to support METR since its founding, including $324,000 in general cash and a $428,000 matching pledge, according to public records.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Moskovitz\u2019s Coefficient Giving \u2013 formerly known as Open Philanthropy before a hasty rebranding last year \u2013 gave $1,515,000 to METR\u2019s incubator, the ARC, in 2022. METR was originally known as ARC Evals before spinning off as an independent nonprofit and changing to its current name in 2023.<\/p>\n

METR staffer Pip Arnott is pictured. METR<\/p>\n

METR does not take any compensation from AI labs for its work, nor does it take donations from executives or employees of AI companies, the METR official said. In the case of Moskovitz\u2019s donation to ARC in 2022, the official said the funding was firewalled and not used for METR\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s hardly reassuruing to critics.<\/p>\n

\u201cSaying you want to be audited by the \u2018independent\u2019 people at METR is a complete joke,\u201d said Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI policy group. \u201cIt\u2019s people who are funded by your buddies. It\u2019s completely ridiculous.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you went out tomorrow and you\u2019re a big bank and you had your audits done by an organization consisting entirely of your own former employees, which was funded by the same investors that are investing in you, do you know what the feds would do with you?\u201d he added. \u201cIt would be positively medieval.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amodei\u2019s surprise proposal published last Saturday morning came just days after Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, abruptly quit the firm while warning that both AI giants were \u201cgambling with our lives\u201d<\/a> by pursuing progress without proper oversight.<\/p>\n

Without safeguards in place, Amodei warned the internet could be overtaken by AI bots within six to 12 months, \u201cpotentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Stop pretending\u2019<\/p>\n

The doomsday warnings received sharp pushback in some corners of the tech and political world, with President Trump asserting that they were a \u201choax\u201d and smaller AI startups arguing that leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI were just trying to rewrite the law to benefit themselves.<\/p>\n

Hjalmar Wijk is chief scientist at METR. He currently works at \u201ctrying to reduce worst-case risks from future models\u201d of different AI models, according to his LinkedIn profile. METR<\/p>\n

Among the skeptics was former White House AI czar David Sacks, who called on Amodei to \u201cstop pretending METR is independent when it is interviewed with Anthropic\u2019s investors and staff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,\u201d he added. \u201cYou face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also unclear if the AI industry\u2019s push to police itself will pass muster with US regulators.<\/p>\n

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned that \u201ceveryone should be deeply suspicious\u201d of any request to grant AI companies an antitrust exemption to coordinate safety efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,\u201d Ferguson said during a Tuesday event at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n

Jasmine Dhaliwal is a policy staffer at METR. METR<\/p>\n

Under Amodei\u2019s proposals, the third-party evaluators \u2013 which some have likened to nuclear inspectors \u2013 would \u201cverify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes,\u201d according to his essay.<\/p>\n

Megan Kinniment Kinniment, a member of METR\u2019s technical staff, previously held a series of positions at the Center on Long-Term Risk in London, where she focused on how \u201cmalevolent actors could increase the likelihood of poor AI outcomes,\u201d according to her LinkedIn. METR<\/p>\n

\u201cAnthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,\u201d Amodei wrote. \u201cWe intend this to be part of a broader push to redouble efforts on our safety and alignment work.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman said he agreed with Amodei about the \u201cneed to pace the frontier\u201d \u2013 adding that \u201ccommitting to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.\u201d He made no mention of METR.<\/p>\n

Anthropic declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Jared Downing and Georgia Worrell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Worried what AI will do to the world? Don\u2019t fret \u2014 we got a group of woke elitists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,6166,363,364,138,56618,65,111,139,69,620,1657,296963,7718,370,145,5189],"class_list":["post-602558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business","tag-dario-amodei","tag-donald-trump","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-sam-bankman-fried","tag-silicon-valley","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}