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What’s the Matter With Effective Altruism?

President Trump has decried the techbro creed for indulging in AI doomerism, but its excesses are far worse than that.

Effective altruism’s fraud-addled poster boy, Sam Bankman-Fried, at a 2021 press conference in Miami.

President Donald Trump may not know much about economics; hence his recent chatter suggesting that buying things from other countries is like throwing money down the drain. But he does seem to grasp one central feature of today’s economic scene: Any slowdown in the AI spending that has been propping up an otherwise tippy economy would make the stock market very sad. And if there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he doesn’t much like it when the stock market is in the doldrums.

So on Monday of last week, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s musings on the need to “pace” AI development sent chip stocks and other investments predicated on the massive buildout of data centers plunging, Trump began railing about the evils of AI doomers—and indeed, anyone not appropriately gung-ho on his brand of AI accelerationism. He claimed that AI risk was a hoax, like other supposed hoaxes, including “RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA,” global warming, and something he insists on calling “Transgender for Everyone.”

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers,” he charged, “and the only one that is happy about it is China.” On Saturday he took up the crusade again, insisting that his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry,” and announcing the imminent creation of an “AI Force,” whatever that may turn out to be outside the overheated cranium of America’s maximum leader.

The Department of Defense, meanwhile, fingered a more specific suspect behind Trump’s claimed conspiracy: a philosophy called effective altruism (EA) that the vast majority of Americans have never heard of. EA began as an attempt to fine-tune the moral logic of philanthropic spending before morphing into something considerably stranger—but we’ll get to that in a moment. The DoD announced the formal beginning of its counteroffensive against EA with a meme on X featuring a photo of Trump with a raised fist and the caption “Americanism, not effective altruism.” Meanwhile, Defense Department Under Secretary Emil Michael dutifully appeared on Fox News to denounce the philosophy as “pretty dystopian.”

Weirdly, this isn’t the first time the Defense Department has taken on the obscure if influential philosophy, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this year dismissed as “defective altruism,” a crack aimed at AI firm Anthropic, widely seen as a bastion of EA true believers, which had balked at the Pentagon’s demand for no restrictions on the use of its AI in its contract with the company.

Indeed, it turns out that the Trump administration didn’t invent this particular conspiracy theory, which has been floating around the fever swamps of the persecution-addled American right for some time. Venture capitalist, podcaster, and former Trump administration crypto and AI czar David Sacks has been making the case against EA for several years now. He routinely decries what he calls the “doomer industrial complex” and suggests that AI companies like Anthropic that talk too much about safety are doing so only to ensure that whatever regulations are coming will disadvantage their competitors. The ultimate aim? You guessed it: “to further ‘Global AI Governance,’ a massive power grab by the bureaucratic state and globalist institutions,” as Sacks put it in an overheated post on X.

Breitbart News and the New York Post have enthusiastically endorsed this conspiracy theory. Breitbart has been especially energetic on this front, charging that “far-left” Silicon Valley billionaires (as if any such creatures can be said to exist) have been pushing EA as part of a globalist conspiracy to take over the world—or at least the world of AI. As Breitbart columnist John Nolte put it in one particularly florid, if also quite repetitive, rant last May, the real “existential risk [of AI] is letting EA reach its sinister globalist goal and the primary goal of all globalists, which is to use scare tactics to convince the free world to........

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