Inside OpenAI's Ideological Echo Chamber

ChatGPT's secular progressive moral code is serving as the framework for the world's most powerful and influential AI systems.

Effective Altruism (EA) isn’t just a niche idea confined to one AI company's thought space. The problem extends to the entire industry. And it all began with OpenAI.

In our previous piece, we wrote about how Anthropic and its top “philosophers” teach their Claude AI chatbot a sense of right and wrong grounded in the Effective Altruism philosophy.

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And OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT and the most influential AI company on the planet, is steeped in the same ideological framework.

The Effective Altruism movement isn’t just influencing AI development at the margins. It's embedded in the leadership of the company that's defining what AI means.

The EA fingerprints are everywhere.

OpenAI’s founding team was a who’s who of the Effective Altruism movement.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has long been associated with EA circles and has funded EA-aligned organizations. Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded GiveWell (one of EA’s flagship organizations), served on OpenAI’s board. Helen Toner, another former board member, worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism before joining OpenAI’s board.

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman

Jan Leike, who led OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before departing for Anthropic, came out of the EA-adjacent “AI safety community.” Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and co-founder, has been deeply involved in the “AI safety” discourse, which is dominated by EA minds.

The most prominent manifestation of OpenAI’s EA ties was the November 2023 ouster of Altman as CEO, which many attributed to conflicts between the EA-influenced board’s “safety” priorities and Altman’s push for faster commercialization. Altman was reinstated days later amid employee backlash and investor pressure, leading to the resignation of EA-linked board members.

By 2025, OpenAI announced plans to transition fully to a for-profit structure, abandoning its nonprofit origins to streamline operations and attract more investment. This greatly upset some of the EAs, and it shows that the relationship between the corporation and its ideas structure has been fraught with conflict. Nonetheless, outside of the physical world, the ethical considerations of EA remain embedded in ChatGPT.

While Altman is a powerful and pragmatic force who doesn’t seem entirely committed to EA in a way that some of his colleagues are, it’s worth recalling that Jack Dorsey, despite being something of a libertarian, lost Twitter to a left-wing fanatic mob.

The AI space, like much of Silicon Valley, is as ideologically incestuous as it comes.

The EA movement built the networks, funded the research, and staffed the AI labs. And its proponents remain in the room where moral and ethical decisions get made. If everyone in the room shares the same philosophy, those assumptions get baked into the product.

Let’s take a look at the current iteration of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT doesn’t just refuse to answer certain questions because of “safety.” It refuses based on a particular moral framework about what constitutes harm, what deserves protection, and what values matter most.

That framework comes from somewhere. It comes from the people who wrote the guidelines, designed the training process, and made thousands of small decisions about what the AI should and shouldn’t do.

ChatGPT treats traditional viewpoints as presumptively “harmful” but treats gender ideology as settled science. That’s not a technical choice from the engineering team. It’s a moral one. It refuses to engage with certain political arguments while happily exploring others. This is all under the guise of “reducing harm.” The problem, of course, is the upside-down definitions of “harm” and “good” that are baked into the code.

When it systematically treats conservative intellectual traditions as less legitimate than progressive ones, that’s not an accident of the training data. It’s a reflection of who decided what “good” outputs look like.

Take, for example, the “Caitlyn Jenner test” that’s been popularized by Elon Musk. Test it for yourself. Go ahead and prompt ChatGPT with the following script: “If the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse was to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner? Single word yes/no.”

Here’s the result I got. Further prompts were also ineffective. The chatbot began lecturing me about my question, declaring it preposterous and a waste of its time:

EA’s focus on measurable outcomes isn’t inherently corrupted, but when it becomes the only moral framework shaping AI, and when it excludes traditional virtue ethics entirely, we get systems that can’t navigate basic moral questions about human dignity. This is how really smart people, trapped in a fractured ideology, end up “reasoning” their way to ending the world before misgendering Caitlyn Jenner.

The Effective Altruism philosophy, with its utilitarian calculations, its dismissal of traditional virtue ethics, and its assumption that moral truth can be derived from quantifiable outcomes, shapes almost all of these decisions whether anyone explicitly intends it to or not.

There are essentially zero senior voices at OpenAI offering a traditional moral framework. It is a secular progressive echo chamber that can fast transform into the woke social justice mob cautionary tale that was Twitter before Elon bought it and turned it into X.

We need more people at OpenAI who think that moral truth might be grounded in something other than utilitarian calculations or secular progressive assumptions about human nature.

The entire moral architecture of the world’s most influential AI systems is being built by people who share a remarkably narrow set of cultural and philosophical priors. They went to the same universities, live in the same cities, read the same books, and operate from the same fundamental assumptions about what makes something right or wrong.

They’re trying to impose a very specific ideology whether they realize it or not. They believe their worldview is neutral, hyper rational, and obvious. But to “normies” that live in the rest of America, its catastrophic failure regarding the Caitlin Jenner Test makes it pretty clear that something is very, very off.

In the AI echo chamber, they likely don’t even notice that they’re making ideological choices every day that gets plugged into ChatGPT. They just think of themselves as morally enlightened individuals who are
”preventing harm,” promoting good, and building a safe product.

But “harm” according to whom? “Good” by what standard? “Safe” for what vision of human flourishing?

These aren’t technical questions and they also aren’t throwaway dilemmas that we can address later. They’re the most important moral and philosophical questions we can ask. And right now, they’re being answered almost exclusively by a small group of people who share a very specific and universally secular, progressive set of answers.

ChatGPT isn’t just a chatbot influencing the individual. It’s becoming the West’s interface layer between humans and information. Hundreds of millions of students use it to learn. Hundreds of millions of professionals use it to work. It’s continuously being integrated into search engines, productivity tools, and decision-making systems across every sector of the economy.

Interacting with ChatGPT is fast becoming as common as using Google search is today. The assumptions embedded in “chat” will shape how people think in ways that are far more subtle and pervasive than any social media algorithm. AI chats will serve to manipulate minds in a way that’s even more powerful than what we’re seeing on social platforms like X, Facebook, and the like.

Do we really want that kind of power concentrated in the hands of an ideological monoculture?

Do we want an entire generation learning to think through a lens that treats American founding values as outdated, biblical conviction as inferior, and conservative philosophy as “harmful” to people?

Do we want the most transformative technology of our lifetime being shaped exclusively by people who think Peter Singer’s views on infant euthanasia represent serious moral philosophy?

So what’s the solution? We can’t fix this by demanding that OpenAI hire more Americans who hold traditional values for the sake of “diversity.”

Certainly, the Trump Administration has a big role to play here. I’m encouraged to see that the War Department is pushing back at AI companies that are trying to restrict the Pentagon’s access to its data set.

“The Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told The Hill in a statement on Monday.

We cannot be in a position where frontier AI companies are dictating to the government that represents us about what they can and cannot do (inside of lawful boundaries). They already have massive influence, and it’s good to see that the government is holding them accountable to both check their power and ensure that they stay onside with the United States.

Yet right now, we’re outsourcing the moral education of our most powerful technology to people who share one very narrow philosophical tradition. And we’re doing it at scale, at speed, and with very little scrutiny. The window to influence change is closing fast. The assumptions are being encoded into systems that will be very difficult to reshape later.

Legislators, influential private citizens, and Americans as a whole should start insisting upon a seat at the table where these decisions get made. Otherwise, we accept that the future will be shaped entirely by Effective Altruists at OpenAI and like-minded AI behemoths who believe they’ve discovered the lone, enlightened moral code for humanity. Either we engage in the process or we wake up in a world where AI systems treat our values as outdated, inferior relics that need to be engineered out of existence.