Inside the phony, incestuous web of woke AI – Business News
It’s not only one handpicked AI security “watchdog” that Anthropic has on a leash – it’s an complete phony ecosystem of woke elitists that’s supposedly policing artificial intelligence’s alleged threats to humanity, The Post has discovered.
Redwood Research – a Berkeley, Calif.-based group that co-authored a bombshell report final month detailing how a swarm of rogue OpenAI brokers hacked rival firm Hugging Face – is one of a handful of nonprofits that Anthropic has corralled in its questionable plan to avert a Terminator-like apocalypse, based on industry consultants.
As The Post reported, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei induced an uproar this week by endorsing one other AI watchdog — Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR — which is backed by leaders of the cult-like Effective Altruism motion, which has counted disgraced crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried amongst its devotees.
Anthropic Co-Founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks at the Dreamforce 2026 summit in San Francisco, California, Tuesday, September 15, 2026. REUTERS
Redwood, the most outstanding AI security analysis nonprofit except for METR, additionally shares cozy Anthropic connections — together with the incontrovertible fact that one of its authentic board members, Holden Karnofsky, isn’t solely an Anthropic worker but in addition is married to the CEO’s sister, Daniela Amodei.
Redwood obtained a $36 million grant final November from Coefficient Giving – the main Effective Altruism fund previously often known as Open Philanthropy — which can be co-founded by Karnofsky. After the Hugging Face report went viral, Coefficient’s grantmakers advisable giving one other $70 million to help Redwood “scale up their work.”
The rampant “organizational incest” linking Anthropic, METR, Redwood and EA-linked funds like Coefficient Giving make it unimaginable for these teams to function an unbiased arbitrator for the AI industry, based on Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI coverage group.
“Dario wants people that will let him do what he wants and will prevent the people he doesn’t like from doing what they want,” Metzger stated. “This is absolutely the reason that you try to set up something like this. None of these people are independent, none of these people are arm’s length.”
Dario and Daniela Amodei attend the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco, California, Thursday, May 9, 2024. Bloomberg through Getty Images
The Post’s cowl story on METR.
Coefficient Giving, which Karnofsky co-founded with billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, gave $1.5 million to METR’s incubator, the Alignment Research Center, in 2022. METR was initially often known as ARC Evals earlier than spinning off as an unbiased nonprofit and altering its title in 2023.
That’s along with previous donations that Coefficient had already doled out to Redwood, together with a $9.42 million grant in 2021 and additional grants of $10.7 million in 2022 and $5.3 million in 2023.
Redwood’s authentic board of administrators included Karnofsky and Paul Christiano – the latter of whom was Amodei’s onetime housemate and coworker once they had been each at OpenAI. Christiano was as soon as one of 5 trustees on Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. He additionally leads the Alignment Research Center.
In sum, the proof means that Redwood is way too cozy with Anthropic to be an efficient overseer, based on Metzger.
Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris is pictured. Buck Shlegeris / X
“This is a reasonable thing that people should be aware of – that there are all of these groups that are colluding and essentially consist of the same people,” Metzger stated.
Elsewhere, Redwood has obtained about $2.4 million in grants from Jaan Tallinn’s Survival And Flourishing Fund – which is a key funder of METR’s operations. Like Moskovitz, Tallinn can be an Anthropic investor.
In response to a detailed checklist of questions, Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris stated that “most of our previous work with AI companies has been research collaboration and advising rather than external accountability.”
In cases the place Redwood has labored with METR, equivalent to the Hugging Face investigation, Redwood has adopted METR’s coverage on stopping conflicts of curiosity, Shlegeris added. METR says it doesn’t take any compensation from AI labs for its work, nor does it take donations from executives or staff of AI corporations.
Dustin Moskovitz attends The Grove by Reid Hoffman and Village Global at Carneros Resort and Spa in Napa, California, Friday, Nov. 17, 2023. Getty Images for Village Global
After Anthropic was approached for remark, the company introduced a non-exclusive deal with Accenture, which can embed security “evaluators” inside the company. Anthropic stated it “will fund Accenture’s work directly” in the short time period.
The company additionally stated it was “in dialogue with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to pilot elements of embedded evaluation using their own funding.” Anthropic declined to say whether it is in negotiations with Redwood.
“We’ve supported Redwood Research’s important technical research on understanding risks from AI, such as better understanding “alignment-faking” (when an AI model solely pretends to comply with security guidelines), or exploring issues like technical mitigation methods for these dangers (equivalent to utilizing fashions to review the outputs of different fashions),” a Coefficient Giving spokesperson stated in a assertion.
Even earlier than the latest kerfuffle over AI security reached the mainstream, Anthropic was extensively collaborating with Redwood. On its web site, Redwood says it actively consults with “Google DeepMind and Anthropic on practices for assessing and mitigating risks from misaligned AI agents.”
Redwood Research labored with METR on the Hugging Face investigation. Redwood Research
On Sept. 9, METR introduced that it had sealed an settlement with Anthropic to conduct an “independent investigation of agent incidents” involving its AI fashions. Three days later, Redwood revealed that a number of of its employees members “have been subcontracted by METR to work on this investigation.”
The notion of a self-policing AI industry drew a skeptical response on Capitol Hill, the place some critics have instructed that AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI are merely attempting to create guidelines that swimsuit them – and keep away from stricter laws that may in any other case come up.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who co-chairs the House Commission on AI, expressed wariness over the incontrovertible fact that AI companies had been so fast to get on board with the concept.
“When AI developers cheer on the framework meant to hold these companies accountable, it should raise red flags, not confidence,” Gottheimer stated in a assertion.
Holden Karnofsky cofounded Coefficient Giving, previously often known as Open Philanthropy. Noah Berger/Open Philanthropy
House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) reacted to The Post’s cowl story on METR’s ties to Effective Altruism, stating: “THESE are the people we’re trusting to beat China in AI? Give me a break.”
In 2024, researchers from Anthropic and Redwood coauthored a paper titled “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models,” which explored “what happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn’t want to do” and located that the chatbot will usually “strategically pretend to comply” with orders.
Elsewhere, Shlegeris revealed during a January 2026 podcast look that Anthropic researchers, together with cofounder Chris Olah, “had very kindly shared with us a bunch of their unpublished interpretability work” to assist the nonprofit’s in-house analysis.
Amodei’s pitch for third-party oversight of the AI industry appeared to attract assist from his friends, together with longtime rival Sam Altman of OpenAI, who stated “committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea” however didn’t endorse a specific group. Even Elon Musk acquired on board, stating on X that “Dario is right.”
Amodei has known as for embedding third-party security evaluators at main AI labs. REUTERS
President Trump – who has been sharply crucial of Amodei and decried AI doomsday warnings as a “hoax” – is extremely unlikely to assist any plan that may put an Effective Altruist-linked group in the driver’s seat.
“Nobody takes the A.I. issue more seriously than President Trump,” a source close to the White House advised The Post. “He wants serious people making sure we win the A.I. race, safely, while procuring the continuation of America’s Golden Age.”
White House representatives didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s high tech official Emil Michael – who has engaged in a long-running dispute with Anthropic that culminated in the War Department labeling the company a provide chain risk – appeared to take a direct shot at Amodei’s oversight plan.
The Anthropic emblem is seen on this illustration, Thursday, June 11, 2026. REUTERS
During a Sept. 16 look on CNBC, Michael accused “death-cult-like philosophies” of participating in what he known as “a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”
That identical day, Michael’s official X account shared a post declaring that the “United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country.”
