The Dossier Goes Viral: Elon Musk, Sacks, and Andreessen Weigh In on Our AI Investigation

The mainstream press has now been forced to cover the story. We're just getting started.

When The Dossier published its initial investigations into the far-left Effective Altruism (EA) machine behind the so-called “AI safety” movement — first exposing how EA operatives built a fake grassroots organization called Humans First to infiltrate the right, and then tracing how that same dark money network used child safety as a Trojan horse to push California-model regulation into red state legislatures — the response was swift and significant.

White House AI czar David Sacks shared our investigation on X, calling Humans First “a censorship power play” — a post that was viewed over 21 million times. Within hours, Elon Musk amplified the post, calling the information gathered from the piece “troubling.” The stories were no longer contained to Substack. They quickly became center of the national conversation about AI governance.

Marc Andreessen, whose views on AI regulation have been consistent and unambiguous (he has called a 50-state patchwork “a startup killer” and argued that federal AI legislation is “the biggest issue for Little Tech”) has been among the most visible voices aligned with the concerns our reporting raised. Some of the nation’s top AI policy minds and operators had now formally identified the network The Dossier exposed as a significant issue for the American people.

NBC News, which has never been accused of sympathy toward this publication, was forced to write about our work. Their piece acknowledged the core of what we reported: that Humans First was founded by staffers at the Center for AI Safety, an EA organization that has received more than $12 million from leftist billionaire Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving, and that the group was constructed to make EA-aligned AI safety priorities more palatable to conservative audiences.

That NBC, a network institutionally hostile to the Trump administration and skeptical of any reporting that complicates the left’s preferred narratives, felt compelled to engage with our investigation is itself a data point. When reporting is too well-sourced to ignore, even the legacy press has to acknowledge it exists.

Their framing, predictably, was sympathetic to Humans First. In part, it’s because the reporter on the byline has his salary paid for by an EA-adjacent institution, called the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

Our reporting was accurate and precise. The documents, the funding trails, the incorporation records, the organizational genealogies, all of it holds up to scrutiny, which is why the facts went unchallenged by NBC. None of it has been disputed on the merits.

The reaction to our reporting confirms the central premise of both pieces. The Effective Altruism network built Humans First precisely because they understood that the EA brand is politically toxic in MAGA America. The moment Sacks and Musk identified Humans First as an influence operation, the group’s architects retreated further into the background.

The federal and state-level EA shadow campaigns continue. The dark money keeps flowing. The architecture we described is only ramping up further.

So of course, our investigation is not finished. The two-part series we published last week was a foundation for more. There are more funding connections to trace, more organizational relationships to map, and more legislators and influencers who have been recruited into this network without understanding who is behind it. We will keep pulling on these threads.

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