The point I was trying to make is, separate from whether these statements are literally false, they give a misleading impression to the reader. If I didn’t know anything about Anthropic and I read the words “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it’s not a theme of the organization or anything”, I might think Anthropic is like Google where you may occasionally meet people in the cafeteria who happen to be effective altruists but EA really has nothing to do with the organisation. I would not get the impression that many of the employees are EAs who work at Anthropic or work on AI safety for EA reasons. And that the three members of the trust they’ve given veto power over the company to have been heavily involved in EA.
I also think being weird and evasive about this isn’t a good communication strategy (for reasons @Mjreard discusses above).
As a side point, I’m confused when you say:
I don’t think they suggest that, depending on your definition of “strong”. Just above the sceenshotted quote, the article mentions that many early investors were at the time linked to EA.
That was said by the author of the article who was trying to make the point that there is a link between Anthropic and EA. So I don’t see this as evidence of Anthropic being forthcoming.
The point I was trying to make is, separate from whether these statements are literally false, they give a misleading impression to the reader. If I didn’t know anything about Anthropic and I read the words “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it’s not a theme of the organization or anything”, I might think Anthropic is like Google where you may occasionally meet people in the cafeteria who happen to be effective altruists but EA really has nothing to do with the organisation. I would not get the impression that many of the employees are EAs who work at Anthropic or work on AI safety for EA reasons. And that the three members of the trust they’ve given veto power over the company to have been heavily involved in EA.
I also think being weird and evasive about this isn’t a good communication strategy (for reasons @Mjreard discusses above).
As a side point, I’m confused when you say:
That was said by the author of the article who was trying to make the point that there is a link between Anthropic and EA. So I don’t see this as evidence of Anthropic being forthcoming.