The Effective Altruists are already in control
Using a crisis – perhaps even a crisis of one’s own devising – as a pretext to seize power? It is a very old trick. Hitler and his National Socialists were once accused of using the Reichstag fire in such a way, and now the Effective Altruists (or EAs) stand accused of something similar. The theory within the Trump administration is that EA and EA-aligned figures such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are whipping up fears of AI doom. They are doing so in order to scare governments into regulating technology – regulations that the EAs would themselves design. Amodei’s recent essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” called on AI companies to accept the oversight of a group called Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI safety NGO.
