Fact check
Is it true: Effective Altruism / SBF / OpenAI-safety funding network (2014-23)?
Partly — it's more complicated than the claim suggests.
The EA / OpenAI / SBF funding network is well documented. Open Philanthropy made a $30 million grant to OpenAI in 2017 (Holden Karnofsky joined OpenAI's board as part of that partnership and left it in 2021) and also funded MIRI and EA infrastructure. The FTX Future Fund granted more than $160 million in 2022 before FTX collapsed, and FTX separately invested $500 million in Anthropic. Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud on 2 November 2023 and sentenced to 25 years on 28 March 2024; the Second Circuit upheld the conviction in June 2026 and his Supreme Court petition was pending in November 2026. Helen Toner left the OpenAI board in November 2023 after it fired Sam Altman, though a law-firm review OpenAI published in 2024 found the firing did not arise from product-safety concerns. The funding and personnel links are real; the claim that they amounted to coordinated, intentional ideological capture of AI governance is not supported by the public record.
The claim
Between 2014 and 2023, Effective Altruism funders (chiefly Open Philanthropy and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX) and linked AI-safety organisations funded OpenAI and Anthropic and placed people in positions of influence over them, and did so as a coordinated effort to capture the governance of artificial intelligence.
Key evidence
Open Philanthropy made a $30 million grant to OpenAI in 2017, with a board seat for Karnofsky
EA funding has also supported causes outside AI — global health, animal welfare
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