In today’s Time article about Anthropic, Daniela Amodei says about EA,
“The same way that you might say some people overlap with a political ideology in some ways, but don’t have a political affiliation—that’s more how I would think about it”
That’s a notable change from her March 2025 comments to Wired:
“I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term.”
To me it reads a bit different, though. Here is the full paragraph from the same article:
The company has deep roots in effective altruism (EA), a social and philanthropic movement dedicated to using reason to do the most good, including by averting catastrophe. In their 20s, the Amodeis began donating to GiveWell, an EA group that evaluates where charity can be deployed most effectively. All seven of its co-founders—all now paper billionaires—have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth. Askell’s ex-husband is William MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher who co-founded the EA movement, and Daniela Amodei is married to Holden Karnofsky, GiveWell’s co-founder and Dario’s former roommate, who works on safety policy at Anthropic. The Amodeis have never publicly embraced the EA label, which became a lightning rod after Sam Bankman-Fried, an EA who invested in Anthropic, was found to have perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. “The same way that you might say some people overlap with a political ideology in some ways, but don’t have a political affiliation—that’s more how I would think about it,” Daniela Amodei says.
This reads more like “oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren’t actually part of that movement at all.” and I think it is understandable. It is basically reputation management efforts after the FTX scandal.
I agree with your assessment, but “oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren’t actually part of that movement at all.” still seems like a warm change since “I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term.”.
Agreed, I think it’s reasonably read as saying “we’re ‘lowercase’ effective altruists, even though we don’t identify with the community or organizations.” It’s probably not helpful to speculate further here (is this just the optimal PR play? or are they being honest?), but regardless it seems clearly better than whatever was happening in that Wired article.
I guess my point was that the underlying position hasn’t changed yet. This is just PR efforts. The people who are close to money, do not discuss anything publicly to “inform” the public; it is all to shape public opinion on certain things. But yeah, you are right in the sense that semantically the two statements are different.
I think they were laughed at enough after the Wired article (from here and elsewhere) that maintaining the previous line was no longer tenable for them.
I also separately think their current stated position is more accurate than the previous one, but I’m just observing that the incentives are a larger fraction of the story behind what they’re saying than what ppl might otherwise be reading them as.
In today’s Time article about Anthropic, Daniela Amodei says about EA,
That’s a notable change from her March 2025 comments to Wired:
To me it reads a bit different, though. Here is the full paragraph from the same article:
This reads more like “oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren’t actually part of that movement at all.” and I think it is understandable. It is basically reputation management efforts after the FTX scandal.
I agree with your assessment, but “oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren’t actually part of that movement at all.” still seems like a warm change since “I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term.”.
Not a huge change perhaps, but still different.
Agreed, I think it’s reasonably read as saying “we’re ‘lowercase’ effective altruists, even though we don’t identify with the community or organizations.” It’s probably not helpful to speculate further here (is this just the optimal PR play? or are they being honest?), but regardless it seems clearly better than whatever was happening in that Wired article.
I guess my point was that the underlying position hasn’t changed yet. This is just PR efforts. The people who are close to money, do not discuss anything publicly to “inform” the public; it is all to shape public opinion on certain things. But yeah, you are right in the sense that semantically the two statements are different.
I think they were laughed at enough after the Wired article (from here and elsewhere) that maintaining the previous line was no longer tenable for them.
I also separately think their current stated position is more accurate than the previous one, but I’m just observing that the incentives are a larger fraction of the story behind what they’re saying than what ppl might otherwise be reading them as.