- Amazon now holds $190 billion in equity tied to Anthropic, a company funded by Sam Bankman-Fried.
- Amazon’s AI safety evaluator, METR, received $1.25 million from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation in July 2022.
- Despite returning the funds in 2024, METR retains deep ties to the effective altruism movement, which funds its operations.
Amazon’s second-quarter 10-Q filing discloses $190 billion in equity tied to Anthropic, a company founded with direct support from FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried. This investment includes approximately $98 billion in convertible notes and $92 billion in non-voting preferred stock.
Bankman-Fried purchased a $500 million stake in Anthropic using FTX customer funds in April 2022, according to a report. He also funded the initial operations of Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), the entity now providing safety assurances for Amazon’s AI models.
METR’s predecessor, the Alignment Research Center, received $1.25 million from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation in July 2022, just four months before FTX’s collapse. The organization later returned the donation in 2024, stating, “we now believe that this money morally (if not legally) belongs to FTX customers or creditors.”
Consequently, METR remains staffed and funded by effective altruists, including support from Good Ventures Foundation and Coefficient Giving. The organization also works directly with Amazon, having piloted a review of Amazon’s in-house frontier AI model in 2025.
Meanwhile, leadership ties run deep between these entities. METR spun out of the Alignment Research Center, led by Paul Christiano, who was a former housemate of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, is Anthropic’s president, and her husband, Holden Karnofsky, co-founded two effective altruism foundations.
Former White House AI czar David Sacks addressed the conflict directly, telling Amodei to “stop pretending METR is independent.” The concerns stem from METR’s focus on AI “misalignment” and potential “superintelligence” risks, jargon rooted in the effective altruism movement.
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