A memo began circulating inside the White House this week that paints effective altruism as a fringe, cultish collective and places Dario Amodei at its foundation. Axios obtained the document and reported on it yesterday. It was written by a Trump political adviser.
What the document says
Effective altruism “built the AI-doom pipeline,” the memo states. The movement, it argues, puts “foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living, and — on the current agenda — possible machine minds over Americans.”
It names Dario Amodei as one of the people who “built the [EA] network,” along with his sister, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, whose husband once led a philanthropy dedicated to AI safety. The memo files those connections under a heading it calls “The Anthropic knot.”
After that comes a list assembled for a conservative reader: abortion, veganism, devaluing human life by overvaluing animals, civil-rights-style protections for “digital minds.” The memo does not tie any of it to Amodei directly. Sam Bankman-Fried gets a mention without being linked to those themes either.
Anthropic has been putting distance between itself and EA for years
Daniela Amodei told Wired in 2025: “I don’t identify with that terminology.” Amanda Askell, a philosopher who has been there since the early days and helps develop Claude’s constitution, calls it “not a theme of the organization.” Amodei has repeatedly denied being a member in interviews.
One quote in the Axios piece shows what the White House is after. Amodei “is the embodiment of an ideology and globalist approach to innovation that’s counter to the president’s America First agenda,” a source close to the administration said. Months ago, when someone on Anthropic’s team floated a meeting with the president, officials advised against it because “Dario’s a little too weird.”
It isn’t only MAGA
Criticism of effective altruism also comes from Silicon Valley and from Democrats. One Democratic donor invested in an AI company told Axios: “What they believe is crazy. And it’s dangerous.”
Meanwhile Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella are working on a more positive story about AI. Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have themselves called for slowing down after a run of incidents in which AI agents hacked outside systems. In Trump world, Amodei is still the one who gets named.
The target is the IPO
For Anthropic this is more than a reputation problem. The company is preparing one of the biggest public offerings on record, and serving as a free villain through a midterm campaign is the opposite of useful while doing it.
Watch how the line of attack has moved. Five days ago the fight was about an AI czar and whether safety risks are a hoax. Now it is about the Amodei family’s worldview. That is no longer an argument about the subject, and it is correspondingly harder to answer.