SBF's $500M Anthropic Bet Lingers Amid AI Safety Critics

Sam Bankman-Fried spearheaded a $580 million funding round into Anthropic in April 2022. Detractors argue that the donor network he promoted still amplifies the AI safety message his money financed.

The FTX founder currently owns no equity in the company. Regulators compelled the disposal of his holdings to compensate creditors. The effective altruism movement he supported, which allocates resources to what it deems most critical, has remained intact.

Destination of SBF's Anthropic Funds

Bankman-Fried invested around $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, securing an approximately 8% ownership share. The company develops 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

Within months of the April 2022 funding, FTX imploded. Bankman-Fried was found guilty of swindling investors out of $3 billion and is now serving a 25-year sentence.

In June, BeInCrypto noted that the FTX estate offloaded the Anthropic holdings for roughly $1.3 billion in 2024. That stake would now carry a value exceeding $30 billion based on Anthropic's current $380 billion valuation.

Current Allocation of the Network's Funds

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was an Anthropic investor in 2021. He serves on the board of Coefficient Giving, the philanthropic organization previously known as Open Philanthropy.

Coefficient provides substantial funding to the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which compensates over 80 journalists at publications such as Time, Bloomberg, and The Guardian. The center asserts that the journalists operate independently.

Longview Philanthropy, another organization within the effective altruism movement, finances Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an entity that assesses frontier models for risk. METR's director, Paul Christiano, previously shared housing with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Anthropic independently employs roughly 1,000 individuals trained on Claude to integrate into over 400 nonprofit organizations. The initiative is named Claude Corps.

Critics Accuse Amodei of Adopting Bankman-Fried's Strategy

Brian Chau, a machine learning engineer who started the AI news platform Effort, told the New York Post that Amodei is currently pursuing safety regulations that would also protect an entrenched firm.

“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.”

According to Chau, such initiatives were originally labeled as effective altruism in their mission. The terminology shifted to AI safety following Bankman-Fried's arrest in December 2022.

In June, Amodei released a policy paper calling for compulsory independent testing of frontier AI models. He did not comment on the regulatory capture accusation.

The Regulatory Battle Amodei Entered

Amodei's statements coincide with Washington heading in the opposite direction. In December 2025, President Trump issued an executive order to override state AI regulations and has described safety concerns as a hoax.

Certain lawmakers argue that the responsibility for AI safety now falls on the developers.

Anthropic increased its federal lobbying expenditures by almost three times, reaching $3.53 million in the first half of 2026.