SPI: The Litigators That Have Never Litigated a Case

I thought the first review was fine—it didn't say much, but there wasn't much to say, and you were asked to write the review so you did what you could.

I think this updated review goes too far in criticizing SPI. To me it reads like you are mad at SPI for asking you not to mention confidentiality and then later mentioning confidentiality itself in a comment, and you wrote this negative review as retribution for making you look bad, not as an objective assessment.

In reality, SPI has never filed a lawsuit, never litigated a case, and legally—never had a "pending case."

The "in reality" phrasing seems to imply that SPI is lying. I don't think SPI is lying. I don't know much about law but my guess is it takes a while to prepare a lawsuit, and that they're still working on it.

SPI says they "spent $0 in [their] entire first fiscal year (2024-2025)," but in January 2025 SPI's website already stated that they reform pesticide use, protect endangered insects, and challenge insect factory farming.

This reads like you are objecting to SPI's use of present tense for activities that are ongoing. The use of present tense seems totally fine to me? When the website says "protect endangered insects", I read that as "The purpose of our ongoing activities is to protect endangered insects", whereas you seem to be interpreting it as "We have already protected endangered insects" and you're indirectly accusing them of lying on that basis. Which I don't think is reasonable.

It is impossible to reform pesticide use with $0.

This is obviously false. You can do political advocacy on a volunteer basis.

Also, SPI doesn't have $0. It spent $0 in its first fiscal year, and now has a small but nonzero budget.

Overall this review falls into the same patterns that you've been criticized for in previous reviews, where you interpret ambiguous evidence in the least charitable possible light, accusing charities of bad behavior when the accusation isn't warranted.

This updated review contains multiple false statements that we must address directly.

False Claim: "SPI Uses 'Confidentiality' to Mislead the Public" SPI has never used confidentiality to mislead anyone. Our operational security concerns are legitimate and not uncommon to organizations doing legal and policy work.

False Claim: "SPI Used 'Confidentiality' to Mislead Vetted Causes" SPI had genuine concerns about how confidentiality was discussed in VettedCauses' draft. However, we had no knowledge their review would be posted to the EA Forum. Only after seeing the forum post and the resulting confusion from our supporters did we feel obligated to explain why our work wasn't more publicly visible, where we then made the decision to discuss it. We were responding to the community's legitimate questions, not executing some deceptive strategy.

Mischaracterization of "Pending Cases": VettedCauses claims we "legally never had a 'pending case.'" Our use of "pending cases" refers to potential litigation in development and preparation - which is a common colloquial usage of the phrase. Legal work includes extensive preparation, research, and strategy development before any court filings occur, and this preparation can take months or even years.

False Claim: "It is impossible to reform pesticide use with $0" This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of advocacy work in general. Public advocacy, policy research, coalition building, and strategy development can all be done on a volunteer basis at zero cost. We have engaged in advocacy and continue to do so as volunteers.

False Claim: "SPI secures donations with inaccurate claims" We have been completely transparent with our donors about our stage of development, our accomplished tasks, our volunteer status, and our work. We have never made inaccurate claims to secure donations.

This strikes us as, assuming good faith, a misunderstanding. We would have appreciated the opportunity to clarify our statements before VettedCauses published these serious accusations. Addressing these false claims requires us to divert limited volunteer resources away from our advocacy work. We hope that in future reviews, VettedCauses will engage in follow-up dialogue when they have concerns about an organization's statements.

As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions and we will be happy to provide information as transparently as we can. Thank you.