Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, speaks during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California on April 30, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google A look at the team Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wants to keep AI from destroying the world proves a key point: No one is as foolish as brainiacs who think they’re the first to take on major issues of ethics and justice.
As The Post’s Thomas Barrabi reports, Amodei — who’s calling for a government-overseen slowdown in AI development to prevent global-annihilation-by-bot — hopes to embed “third-party evaluators” at AI firms to monitor safety.
The overseers would come from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, which is supposedly independent but has roots in the cult-like Effective Altruism movement, itself deeply connected to Amodei.
EA calls for a technocratic brand of what it calls altruism that in fact would impose its members’ (ignorant) views.
Palantir’s chief tech officer, Shyam Sankar, warns that “EA is the unseen force driving AI discourse” — the “belief system of the majority of AI researchers.”
Indeed, many of Anthropic’s employees are devotees; the best word to describe them? Kooks (with high IQs).
Amodei himself gives biweekly sermons, and the company’s made a show of selecting “Christian” leaders to give its chatbot, Claude, moral guidance.
The tinker-toy philosophy extends to treating AI programs as people: Staffers attended a “funeral” for one version, Claude 3 Sonnet, and let another, Opus 3, keep churning out essays after it was “retired.”
Another warning sign about EA’s shambolic “principles”: Its “ends justifies the means” approach has already landed one leading proponent, Sam Bankman-Fried, behind bars for what amounts to massive fraud.
Bankman-Fried claimed his goal was to haul in as much cash as possible to use to benefit mankind; in the event, for the 2022 midterms, that meant devoting nearly all his $40 million in political donations to Democrats and left-leaning activism.
Some $27 million went to the Protect Our Future political action committee, which in turn funded several Dems, including $1.5 million for obnoxious Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett.
And SBF got his money by defrauding investors in his FTX crypto exchange — to the tune of $3 billion.
Beyond their lefty tilt, EA groupies ponder such weighty ethical issues as whether “a single country like the United States” or even “a single species like humanity” should take precedence, writes Sankar; somehow, “shrimp welfare” is an urgent priority.
These are the people who are to place guardrails on AI.
Already, they’re embedded not only at AI labs but charities, news outlets and elsewhere.
Please. Mankind wasn’t created yesterday and doesn’t need an exclusive clan of egghead amateurs determining what’s ethical and controlling the future.
Yes, AI technology — like any other tech — can be faulty or used maliciously.
Amodei and his peers’ job is to make sure their product isn’t defective, and to figure out safeguards against abuse; the government’s job is to hold its makers held responsible for any foreseeable damage it causes.
But the last thing America needs is a federally-empowered coterie of self-appointed and foolish moral guardians setting the AI rules of the road for everyone else.
