Effective Altruism is often reported in the legacy media as simply a movement with adherents that follow a “philosophy focused on doing good in the world.” Its followers claim that mathematical calculations can determine any and all questions about morality and virtue.
A bit rudimentary and out there. But simple enough, right?
Yet behind that simple sales pitch is a considerably radical ideology. Effective Altruism, or EA, at its core, subordinates ordinary moral obligations — often focused on prioritizing family, God, country and truth itself — to “utility.” Its founding philosophers and current evangelists have appointed themselves the masters of quantifying utility and determining which causes matter most.
EA is a secular cult whose adherents often first encounter EA during their undergraduate studies in STEM fields. EAs are highly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area but they also have a significant presence in other geographic centers of power and influence. It has grown to incorporate a series of ultra-wealthy and influential patrons, and it has a small foothold in several of America’s elite academic and nonprofit institutions. In the AI space, their followers are identifiable through their apocalyptic prophecies, hubris, and moral claims of superiority. EA often attracts intelligent and largely apolitical young people by simplifying their worldview into a quantifiable speed run philosophy that sells them on humanity’s highest calling.
The intellectual patriarch for the EA movement is generally accepted to be Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. In his seminal 1972 EA essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer argues that we should donate substantial portions of our wealth to alleviate suffering in very specific quantifiable ways. However, Singer rejects the idea that every human life possesses inherent and equal dignity. He has controversially declared that newborn infants do not possess the same claim to life as self-aware persons, and therefore, could be candidates for infanticide. Princeton itself has hosted a debate specifically examining his views on “abortion and infanticide.” These views have become attached to EA and this is one of the core reasons why EAs tend to overwhelmingly vote for Democratic Party candidates. The Singer-EA model assesses cognition as a pretext for human value and skates very closely along eugenics lines in the process.
William MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher, helped build EA into a broader international movement and is credited with bringing millennials and Gen Z into the EA fold. His ex-wife is Amanda Askell, the resident philosopher at Anthropic. MacAskill-led and influenced organizations have popularized the EA-related “earning to give” mantra. The idea is that EAs should enter a lucrative profession and make as much money as possible, before donating their fortune to causes selected by the EA priesthood. MacAskill later helped popularize a staple EA term called “longtermism,” under which the hypothetical welfare of trillions of potential future beings can outweigh the needs and rights of people alive today. EAs think of “longtermism” in “millions, billions, and trillions of years.”
The true absurdity of EA reasoning was illustrated by a 2015 article from William MacAskill and Amanda Askell arguing that mass slaughtering wild predators like lions could reduce animal suffering.
Through their botched, poorly thought-out suffering-minimization formula, slaughtering wild predators is “compassionate” because it saves farm animals like chickens. Behold, the dangers of utilitarian arithmetic.
The “lion genocide” idea has led to EAs coming up with a whole host of morally absurd ideas to “prevent suffering.”
One such prominent EA account recently wrote about how “insects matter more than people in the aggregate.” No, he was not joking. Another prominent EA professor took to defending “Shrimp welfare” because they “feel pain” and therefore humans must “reduce the suffering we inflict on them.” Many, if not most EAs are vegans because they highly prioritize the welfare of living creatures and often do not separate them on the moral hierarchy from humans.
EA is at its most dangerous when it comes to the concept of truth, and its value in the moral hierarchy of the ideology.
The Abrahamic faiths teach that humans are morally accountable for their actions, words, and beliefs before a just God. EAs believe actions, words, and beliefs matter far less than measurable impact. If morality is merely a matter of consequence, then lying is fine because an EA could use deception to bring forth greater utility.
EA advocates say that enlightened utilitarians will prioritize honesty because it creates trust, and trust is important because it creates good consequences. Singer wages this defense after the infamous FTX scandal, arguing that “wise, effective altruists and utilitarians know that honesty is the best policy.” But Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) did not make those calculations when he determined the stakes were too high.
Popular AI doomsday preacher Liron Shapira supplied a revealing example of EA taqiyya when he announced that he was registering as a Republican “in the interest of making AI x-risk bipartisan.” Shapira, who hosts a popular YouTube channel, added that he was a “one-issue voter” focused on preventing human extinction. For EAs like Shapira, partisan affiliation is just a strategic instrument. The identity is a noble lie but it has become useful because it helps him sell the apocalypse narrative to Republicans, who are less likely to believe in the AI superintelligence apocalypse theory.
EAs prioritize utility over honesty, which is why so many non-EAs in the tech world are wary of them as corrosive vehicles for moral poison. EAs are especially manipulative on AI because many believe that human extinction via AI is a highly plauisble reality, so being truthful and honest has now become a non-factor in support of “saving the planet.”
Given that EA is a speedrun philosophy, there are gaps in its core principles that often reveal themselves as total hypocrisy. This often appears in the self-described “rationalist” world that its members inhabit. While it’s not hard to find an EA obsessing over probabilities, in the next breath, they’ll reach the emotionally overpowering conclusion that AI will kill everyone, despite the notion of a sentient AI being nothing more than a shaky theory. Still, they’ll work backward to lock in a utility that gives their forecase (p(doom)) for that predetermined conclusion. Their forecasts suddenly become mathematical facts through obfuscation and outright lies, because the ends now justify the means.
No figure exposed the dark side of the EA movement more thoroughly than Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the infamous crypto fraudster who remains in federal prison after he was convicted in 2024 of seven criminal counts of fraud and conspiracy. William MacAskill is credited with introducing SBF to the “earning to give” concept, and Bankman-Fried, inspired by EA principles, became the movement’s largest patron. SBF and EA allies spun up the FTX Future Fund with money that had been allegedly acquired in part through siphoned customer funds, and proudly advertised plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars into political causes prioritized by EAs. Its leadership included MacAskill and other major EA figures, like Leopold Aschenbrenner, whose Situational Awareness hedge fund just coughed up billions of dollars in losses.
Before FTX collapsed, the group proudly delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to EA priorities, and it was heavily involved in Democratic politics, according to The New York Times.
Before everything went sideways, Bankman-Fried was an EA in high standing with his fellow travelers, and the corporate press was all too happy to declare him a whiz kid grounded in Effective Altruism. He greatly helped EA expand from a niche Bay Area movement to one that captured institutions and influence. But when the fraud and stolen customer money became an undeniable reality, EA leaders suddenly disavowed him as if they never had anything to do with him. Yes, even the EAs who lived in the “SBF polycule,” the polyamorous group of top executives who lived together in a $40 million luxury penthouse in the Bahamas while running FTX and its sister trading firm, Alameda Research. Team members and affiliated researchers dissolved the FTX foundation, but moved on to separate organizations doing virtually identical work, as if nothing had happened. And yes, the EA “culture” continues to make waves in the media.
Anthropic founder Dario Amodei has long been a staple in EA circles, but he has been politically savvy enough to not publicly identify as an EA. Before launching Anthropic, he and his cofounder sister lived in an EA group house with GiveWell co-founder Holden Karnofsky. Amodei has publicly discussed these forces as part of the “AI safety community” rather than embracing or rejecting the baggage that comes with the EA name.
The FTX implosion revealed the moral shortcomings of “earning to give,” which gives sanction to the notion of “fake it till you make it.” If making money is just a means to an end, then utilitarian moral compromises are fair game, and accumulating money through ill-gotten gains can be rationalized.
While the FTX money disappeared, EA still retained its robust funding engine: Open Philanthropy (which has rebranded to Coefficient Giving), is now EA’s top funding mechanism, and it’s financed principally by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. It has funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars of EA political priorities into aligned organizations. The Moskovitz network has supported think tanks and policy organizations, and it has even spawned fake organizations to grow an increasingly elaborate AI-doomer ecosystem.
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One month after The Dossier reported that Humans First — the self-styled “nonpartisan social movement” lobbying for heavy handed AI regulation — was an Effective Altruist (EA) front operation built to launder a progressive censorship agenda through conservative voices, the group has responded in the most revealing way possible: by ditching the bipartisa…
Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian billionaire, is probably the second most influential EA funder behind Moskovitz. He has helped to seed several EA-adjacent organizations to influence AI and tech policy, including the Future of Life Institute (FLI). Max Tegmark, the founder of FLI who brought together the “Bernie-Bannon coalition” of AI doomerism, is a longtime EA advocate, though he now tries to distance himself from the movement.
Like true revolutionaries, the EAs are beginning to eat their own, rebrand, and fracture into splinter groups.
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is one of the EA movement’s most robust institutions and one of the most well-funded AI-doomer outfits in America. CAIS has received millions from Open Philanthropy and has created several astroturf organizations in Washington, D.C. with the mission to nuke innovation.
However, its founders, though ideologically identical to EAs, are now distancing themselves from the EA label.
In their efforts to infiltrate the Washington, D.C. lobbying and influence scene, they’ve undergone a revealing rebrand. CAIS is trying to detach the AI doomerism from EA’s damaged reputation while preserving its apocalyptic premises and much of its funding lineage.
Both the White House and the Pentagon have joined the campaign against EA. Former Uber executive Emil Michael, who serves as the CTO of the War Department, is all too familiar with EA, and he has spearheaded some of the Trump Administration’s efforts to raise awareness about the nefarious ideology. The DOW technology account recently declared, “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country.”
Michael has described EA as a “dystopian” anti-human ideology, while additional administration officials have attacked it more broadly as the “Doomer Industrial Complex” they believe would fumble America’s advantage in AI and deliver it to China.
Effective Altruism might be rebranding, but its ideals remain embedded staples of the AI-doomer movement. It delivers corrupted moral authority, botched arithmetic and an excuse to override ordinary human virtue. It’s a philosophy that promises utility over honesty, and that core concept is why so many Americans are right to be wary of its influence across the nation.
Great article, @dossier! These EA creeps are dangerous.
More than anything else, it's how people who are utterly empty inside exercise the most evolved possible form of virtue signaling, with a level of smugness that elevates "smug" to a level that really requires a whole new word. They embody this excellent quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - C. S. Lewis