Memo circulating in the White House casts effective altruism as a cult that ‘built the AI-doom pipeline’, with Dario Amodei at its center
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
Axios reported on Sept 24, 2026 that a memo by a Trump political adviser, circulating in the White House, portrays effective altruism as a fringe, cult-like movement that “built the AI-doom pipeline”.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
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Key facts
- Memo says EA prioritizes ‘foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living, and — on the current agenda — possible machine minds over Americans’
- Names Dario Amodei among those who ‘built the [EA] network’, and Daniela Amodei, whose husband once led an AI-safety philanthropy, calling the ties ‘The Anthropic knot’
- Author: a Trump political adviser (Axios); not publicly named
- Fortune (Sept 28): a memo attacking Amodei (a ‘long record of attacking Trump’, ‘deep Democratic ties’) circulated before his White House dinner with Trump on Sunday Sept 27
- Anthropic has sought to distance itself from effective altruism
What happened
The memo, described by Axios, frames AI-risk concerns as the product of an EA network and puts the Amodeis at its center. It appeared while Anthropic was fighting the Pentagon’s supply-chain-risk designation in court and preparing an IPO.
Why it matters
It shows the political fight over AI safety in Washington becoming personal and ideological: safety arguments are recast as a movement’s agenda, which shapes how the administration receives Anthropic’s calls to “pace the frontier”.
Caveat: Fortune dates the Trump–Amodei dinner “Sunday, Sept 28”, but Sept 27, 2026 was the Sunday; we follow the White House-summit entry (Sept 27). It is unclear whether the Axios and Fortune articles describe the same memo.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 press
Press
Changes
- Filed