Anthropic is not being consistently candid about their connection to EA

I understand why people shy away from/hide their identities when speaking with journalists but I think this is a mistake, largely for reasons covered in this post but I think a large part of the name brand of EA deteriorating is not just FTX but the risk-averse reaction to FTX by individuals (again, for understandable reasons) but that harms the movement in a way where the costs are externalized.

When PG refers to keeping your identity small, he means don't defend it or its characteristics for the sake of it. There's nothing wrong with being a C/C++ programmer, but realizing it's not the best for rapid development needs or memory safety. In this case, you can own being an EA/your affiliation to EA and not need to justify everything about the community. 

We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don't want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you'd be happy to be associated with.

I'm a proud EA.

Note that much of the strongest opposition to Anthropic is also associated with EA, so it's not obvious that the EA community has been an uncomplicated good for the company, though I think it likely has been fairly helpful on net (especially if one measures EA's contribution to Anthropic's mission of making transformative AI go well for the world rather than its contribution to the company's bottom line). I do think it would be better if Anthropic comms were less evasive about the degree of their entanglement with EA.

(I work at Anthropic, though I don't claim any particular insight into the views of the cofounders. For my part I'll say that I identify as an EA, know many other employees who do, get enormous amounts of value from the EA community, and think Anthropic is vastly more EA-flavored than almost any other large company, though it is vastly less EA-flavored than, like, actual EA orgs. I think the quotes in the paragraph of the Wired article give a pretty misleading picture of Anthropic when taken in isolation and I wouldn't personally have said them, but I think "a journalist goes through your public statements looking for the most damning or hypocritical things you've ever said out of context" is an incredibly tricky situation to come out of looking good and many of the comments here seem a bit uncharitable given that.)

Edit: the comment above has been edited, the below was a reply to a previous version and it makes less sense now, leaving it for posterity

You know much more than I do, but I'm surprised by this take. My sense is that Anthropic is giving a lot back:

funding

My understanding is that all early investors in Anthropic made a ton of money, it's plausible that Moskovitz made as much money by investing in Anthropic as by founding Asana. (Of course this is all paper money for now, but I think they could sell it for billions).

As mentioned in this post, co-founders also pledged to donate 80% of their equity, which seems to imply they'll give much more funding than they got. (Of course in EV, it could still go to zero)

staff

I don't see why hiring people is more "taking" than "giving", especially if the hires get to work on things that they believe are better for the world than any other role they could work on

and doesn't contribute anything back

My sense is that (even ignoring funding mentioned above) they are giving a ton back in terms of research on alignment, interpretability, model welfare, and general AI Safety work
 

To be clear, I don't know if Anthropic is net-positive for the world, but it seems to me that its trades with EA institutions have been largely mutually beneficial. You could make an argument that Anthropic could be "giving back" even more to EA, but I'm skeptical that it would be the most cost-effective use of their resources (including time and brand value)

Everything you say is correct I think, but I think in more normal circles, pointing out the inconsistency between someone's wedding page and their corporate PR bullshit would seem a bit weird and obsessive and mean. I don't find it so, but I think ordinary people would get a bad vibe from it. 

I think you shouldn't assume that people are "experts" on something just because they're married to someone who is an expert, even when (like Daniela) they're smart and successful.

I agree that these statements are not defensible. I'm sad to see it. There's maybe some hope that the person making these statements was just caught off guard and it's not a common pattern at Antrhopic to obfuscate things with that sort of misdirection. (Edit: Or maybe the journalist was fishing for quotes and made it seem like they were being more evasive than they actually were.) 

I don't get why they can't just admit that Anthropic's history is pretty intertwined with EA history. They could still distance themselves from "EA as the general public perceives it" or even "EA-as-it-is-now." 

For instance, they could flag that EA maybe has a bit of a problem with "purism" -- like, some vocal EAs in this comment section and elsewhere seem to think it is super obvious that Antrhopic has been selling out/became too much of a typical for-profit corporation. I didn't myself think that this was necessarily the case because I see a lot of valid tradeoffs that Anthropic leadership is having to navigate, and the armchair quarterbacks EAs seem to be failing to take that into account? However, the communications highlighted in the OP made me update that Anthropic leadership probably does lack the integrity needed to do complicated power-seeking stuff that has the potential to corrupt. (If someone can handle the temptions from power, they should at the very least be able to handle the comparatively easy dynamics of don't willingly distort the truth as you know it.)

from Their wedding page 2023,

Not sure if I misunderstand something but the wedding page seems from 2017? (It reads "October 21, 2017" at the top.)

no one cares about EA except EAs and some obviously bad faith critics trying to tar you with guilt-by-association

I agree with your broad points, but this seems false to me. I think that lots of people seem to have negative associations with EA, especially given SBF and in the AI and tech space where eg it's widely (and imo falsely) believed that the openai coup was for EA reasons

The point I was trying to make is, separate from whether these statements are literally false, they give a misleading impression to the reader. If I didn't know anything about Anthropic and I read the words “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it's not a theme of the organization or anything”, I might think Anthropic is like Google where you may occasionally meet people in the cafeteria who happen to be effective altruists but EA really has nothing to do with the organisation. I would not get the impression that many of the employees are EAs who work at Anthropic or work on AI safety for EA reasons. And that the three members of the trust they've given veto power over the company to have been heavily involved in EA.

I also think being weird and evasive about this isn't a good communication strategy (for reasons @Mjreard discusses above).

As a side point, I'm confused when you say:

I don't think they suggest that, depending on your definition of "strong". Just above the sceenshotted quote, the article mentions that many early investors were at the time linked to EA.

That was said by the author of the article who was trying to make the point that there is a link between Anthropic and EA. So I don't see this as evidence of Anthropic being forthcoming.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2025-03-30T22:09 (+2)

As a side point, I'm confused when you say:

I don't think they suggest that, depending on your definition of "strong". Just above the sceenshotted quote, the article mentions that many early investors were at the time linked to EA.

That was said by the author of the article who was trying to make the point that there is a link between Anthropic and EA. So I don't see this as evidence of Anthropic being forthcoming.

 

I think in the context of the article, their quotes (44 words in total) make more sense:

 

In that context, the quotes clarify that Anthropic is not an "EA company", and give a more accurate understanding of the relationship to the reader.

A more in-depth analysis of the historical affiliations, separations, agreements, and disagreements of Anthropic's funders, founders, and employees with various parts of EA over the past 15 years would take far more than two paragraphs.
 

 

If I didn't know anything about Anthropic and I read the words “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it's not a theme of the organization or anything”, I might think Anthropic is like Google where you may occasionally meet people in the cafeteria who happen to be effective altruists but EA really has nothing to do with the organisation.

You wouldn't think that in the context of the article, though.

 

I would not get the impression that many of the employees are EAs who work at Anthropic or work on AI safety for EA reasons. And that the three members of the trust they've given veto power over the company to have been heavily involved in EA.

I don't know what percentage of Anthropic employees consider themselves part of the EA community. Also, I don't agree that it's clear that Evidence Action's CEO is part of the effective altruism community because evidence action received money from GiveWell. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanika-bahl-091a936/details/experience/ She was working in global health since before effective altruism was a thing, and many/most people funded by OpenPhilanthropy don't consider themselves part of the community. In the same way that charities funded by Catholic donors are not necessarily Catholic. It does seem that OpenPhilanthropy was their main source of funding for many years though, which makes the link stronger than I originally thought.

Just as a side point, I do not think Amanda's past relationship with EA can accurately be characterized as much like Jonathan Blow, unless he was far more involved than just being an early GWWC pledge signatory, which I think is unlikely.  It's not just that Amanda was, as the article says, once married to Will. She wrote her doctoral thesis on an EA topic, how to deal with infinities in ethics: https://askell.io/files/Askell-PhD-Thesis.pdf  Then she went to work in AI for what I think is overwhelmingly likely to be EA reasons (though I admit I don't have any direct evidence to that effect) , given that it was in 2018 before the current excitement about generative AI, and relatively few philosophy PhDs, especially those who could fairly easily have gotten good philosophy jobs, made that transition. She wasn't a public figure back then, but I'd be genuinely shocked to find out she didn't have an at least mildly significant behind the scenes effect through conversation (not just with Will) on the early development of EA ideas. 

Not that I'm accusing her of dishonesty here or anything: she didn't say that she wasn't EA or that she had never been EA, just that Anthropic wasn't an EA org. Indeed, given that I just checked and she still mentions being a GWWC member prominently on her website, and she works on AI alignment and wrote a thesis on a weird, longtermism-coded topic, I am somewhat skeptical that she is trying to personally distance from EA: https://askell.io/

I think the people in the article you quote are being honest about not identifying with the EA social community, and the EA community on X is being weird about this.

I never interpreted that to be the crux/problem here. (I know I'm late replying to this.) 

People can change what they identify as. For me, what looks shady in their responses is the clusmy attempts at downplaying their past association with EA.

I don't care about it because I still identify with EA; instead, I care because it goes under "not being consistently candid." (I quite like that expression despite its unfortunate history). I'd be equally annoyed if they downplayed some significant other thing unrelated to EA.

Sure, you might say it's fine not being consistently candid with journalists. They may quote you out of context. Pretty common advice for talking to journalists is to keep your statements as short and general as possible, esp. when they ask you things that aren't "on message." Probably they were just trying to avoid actually-unfair bad press here? Still, it's clumsy and ineffective. It backfired. Being candid would probably have been better here even from the perspective of preventing journalists from spinning this against them. Also, they could just decide not to talk to untrusted journalists? 

More generally, I feel like we really need leaders who can build trust and talk openly about difficult tradeoffs and realities.

You seem to have ignored a central part of what was said by Daniela Amodei; "I'm not the expert on effective altruism," which seems hard to defend.

As always, and as I've said in other cases, I.don't think it makes sense to ask a disparate movement to make pronouncements like this.