This proposed comment was posted at an extremely strange time yesterday!
I hashed 171 Wayback captures of the METR conflict of interest page.
None contained the COI policy in the PDF. It showed up yesterday, right before this comment did! *Very* strange!
I also went *really* deep on METR's funding, and here's what we know of the $71 million that METR claimed to have raised over the past 6 months.
Almost nothing. Of the claimed $71 million, almost none of it has a paper trail. I ran hundreds of agents, combing every financial document available. I could only find $350K with a clean paper trail.
We don't know where 99% of the funding comes from. We don't know the dollar amounts. We don't have disclosures from any of those funders about Anthropic stock stakes. We don't know anything except some names, and we don't know if those supporters are inside that $71 million.
METR has according to its own account roughly quintupled its funding in the past 6 months, and we know almost nothing about it!
Most of the claimed conflict of interest policy relies on *internal review*. They tell us what they want us to know, according to them. Convenient!
And the COI policy itself is paper thin. It simply does not cover the structural financial incentive problems that I argue are very real and important, namely that Open Misanthropy has for the past decade constructed a self-perpetuating AI Doom-Industrial Complex, rich with conflicts of interest not covered by the COI policy.
Which conveniently, all of its orgs propose that it should manage, govern, and regulate!
So convenient!
And it does not cover the very serious problem that Anthropic stock exploding in value sits at the heart of its parent org created by Dustin Moskovitz! -- meaning, that the better Anthropic does as a company, the more powerful the network proposing to govern and regulate and educate about "AI safety", always reinforcing the Misanthropic narrative, becomes!
Given that the discourse around AI recently has been about the extinction of humanity, one would think that organizations that propose to govern on a risk so grave would be more transparent than that.
And yet they are not. Strange!
Why is so much hidden from us, if humanity is at stake?
What we do know is what I documented in my post. It's in the structured data on Github.
And what can only be suspected -- but not proven! -- is that some employee at Open Misanthropy or Misanthropic posted this comment immediately after the paper-thin COI policy was posted.
But the fact is that no COI policy can be enough. The conflicts are the point. The Misanthropic Network is going all in, and there's no way they can reverse course now.
Congress and Trump should investigate. These people are not looking after the American people. They are concerned with making their own narrow faction of investors and "philanthropists" fat and rich! And they do not care if China wins the AI race, so long as they get their piece of the pie.
Here is my investigation on the specifics of METR's funding. It proves that we know nothing:
github.com/kevinnbass/metr-d…
The Misanthropic Network wants to keep it that way.
Investigation now!
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.