Sam Bankman-Fried’s $500 Million Investment Still Haunts Anthropic

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) led a $580 million funding round into Anthropic in April 2022. Critics say the donor network he championed still amplifies the artificial intelligence (AI) safety message his money paid for.

The FTX founder holds no stake today. Prosecutors forced a sale of his shares to repay creditors. The effective altruism network he backed, which funds causes it judges most urgent, stayed in place.

Where Bankman-Fried’s Anthropic Money Went

Bankman-Fried put roughly $500 million into Anthropic in 2021 for about an 8% stake. Anthropic builds the Claude chatbot.

SBF and his buds Nishad and Caroline personally made a $580m investment in Anthropic, an AI dev corp, in April 2022. Inquiring minds would like to know more. pic.twitter.com/Cy28OLIhXh

— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) November 29, 2022

Months after the April 2022 round, FTX collapsed. He was convicted of defrauding investors of $3 billion and is serving 25 years.

BeInCrypto reported in June that the estate sold that Anthropic stake for about $1.3 billion in 2024. It would be worth more than $30 billion at Anthropic’s latest $380 billion valuation.

Where the Network’s Money Goes Today

Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder, invested in Anthropic in 2021. He sits on the board of Coefficient Giving, the grantmaker formerly called Open Philanthropy.

Coefficient is a major backer of the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which pays more than 80 reporters at outlets including Time, Bloomberg, and The Guardian. It says they are independent.

Longview Philanthropy, another effective altruism group, funds Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), which grades frontier models on risk. Its head, Paul Christiano, once roomed with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei.

Anthropic separately pays about 1,000 people trained on Claude to embed inside more than 400 nonprofits. It calls the program Claude Corps.

Critics Who Say Amodei Borrowed the Playbook

Brian Chau, a machine learning engineer, founded the AI news site Effort. He told the New York Post that Amodei now seeks safety rules that would also shield an established company.

“So it’s no surprise that he’s now copying literally the exact same tactics used by Sam Bankman-Fried in order to achieve regulatory monopoly.”

Chau said those programs were once named effective altruism as their purpose. The wording changed to AI safety after Bankman-Fried’s arrest in December 2022.

Amodei published a policy essay in June seeking mandatory third-party testing of frontier models. He did not address the capture argument.

The Fight Amodei’s Push Landed In

Amodei’s remarks come as Washington moves the other way. Trump signed an order in December 2025 to preempt state AI laws and has called safety fears a hoax.

Some members of Congress say the burden of AI safety now rests on developers themselves.

Anthropic nearly tripled its federal lobbying spending to $3.53 million in the first half of 2026.