Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeis handpicked AI watchdog has deep ties to woke Effective Altruism movement: a complete joke

Come with them if you want to live. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world — and it just so happens to have deep ties to his old housemate and the woke Effective Altruism movement that’s already been involved in one major tech meltdown.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. Effective Altruism, a philosophy that’s become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe, advocates for using reason — and fortunes amassed by tech’s best and brightest — to do the most good for humanity over the long term.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 – 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. The overlap between METR and Anthropic is rife with potential conflicts of interest, according to critics.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’s housemate, coworker and research collaborator in the 2010s when they were both at OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest rival. Christiano also served as one of the fir...