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 My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term".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.
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.
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.