Author: Schen TechFlow
Anthropic is now the most important AI company on this planet, perhaps without exception.
Its Claude large model is deployed at the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies, and national laboratories, and is used by the U.S. military for intelligence analysis and target selection in military strikes against Iran.
Its annual revenue surged from zero to $14 billion in less than three years. In February 2026, Anthropic completed a $30 billion Series G funding round, pushing its post-money valuation past $380 billion. Tech giants including Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are lining up to invest.
Over the past few weeks, it has been engaged in a globally watched standoff with the Pentagon over the weaponization of AI.
In the company’s early funding history, one name remains widely discussed: Sam Bankman-Fried.
In April 2022, ChatGPT did not yet exist, and the AI sector was nowhere near as hot as it is today. SBF, through his controlled hedge fund Alameda Research, invested $500 million into Anthropic’s Series B round, acquiring 86% of the entire financing and approximately 8% equity. Seven months later, the FTX empire collapsed, and SBF became the central figure in the largest crypto fraud in history, sentenced to 25 years in prison—the $500 million was customer deposits from FTX.
But if SBF hadn’t been arrested and if those funds had been legitimate, an 8% equity stake at today’s $380 billion valuation would theoretically be worth over $30 billion. Turning $500 million into $30 billion represents a return of more than 60 times—among the highest absolute profits in the history of venture capital.
A crypto fraudster currently serving time in federal prison nearly pulled off the most insane bet in AI investment history.
Why did SBF approach Anthropic in 2022? Why did he dare to invest $500 million? And why did Anthropic accept the money?
The answer lies within a circle known as "Effective Altruism."
A shared apartment, a movement, a check
In the mid-2010s in San Francisco, a group of people lived in the same type of shared apartments, attended the same kinds of gatherings, read the same papers, and subscribed to the same philosophy.
This philosophy is called Effective Altruism (EA). Its core premise is simple: charity should not be driven by emotion, but by calculation. Every dollar should be directed toward the option that mathematically maximizes positive impact. And according to a major branch of EA, humanity’s foremost existential risk is not nuclear war or pandemic, but uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
Dario Amodei has been immersed in this circle.
He is the 43rd signatory of the Giving What We Can Pledge, committing to donate at least 10% of his income, and has been a fan of GiveWell since 2007 or 2008.
He lived in the same shared house with two people: Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy and one of the most influential fund allocators in the EA movement; and Paul Christiano, a leading researcher in AI alignment. At the time, both Dario and Paul served as technical advisors to Open Philanthropy.
Later, Karnofsky married Dario’s sister, Daniela. After their engagement, the couple briefly lived with Dario. In January 2025, Karnofsky quietly joined Anthropic as a “technical staff member,” overseeing security strategy. When Fortune journalists uncovered the matter, Anthropic had not yet publicly announced the appointment.
This is an intimate social network.
Amanda Askell, an early employee of Anthropic, is the former wife of William MacAskill, one of the founders of the EA movement. She was the 67th signatory of GWWC, and her doctoral thesis addressed a core issue in EA philosophy: how to handle infinity in ethics.
Anthropic’s most important governance body, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, theoretically holds significant control over the company; three of its four members directly come from the EA ecosystem: Neil Buddy Shah, former Executive Director of GiveWell; Zach Robinson, CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism; and Kanika Bahl, CEO of Evidence Action, a long-term grantee of GiveWell.
The three largest backers in EA's history are all early investors in Anthropic: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
This was the real path SBF took to reach Anthropic—not due to any brilliant investment insight or foresight into the AI sector, but simply an internal circle of fund flows: EA money going to EA projects to solve problems defined by EA.
SBF adhered to the more radical branch of EA, known as "earning to give." He left his job at the Wall Street quantitative firm Jane Street to enter the cryptocurrency space, publicly stating that his goal was not personal wealth but "altruism"—to earn as much money as possible and then direct it toward causes with the greatest positive impact. Anthropic’s mission, “to safely develop powerful AI,” is nearly identical to EA’s standard prescription for addressing existential risks from AI.
In May 2021, Jaan Tallinn led Anthropic’s Series A round of $124 million, with Moskovitz participating. In April 2022, SBF took over as lead investor in the Series B round, writing a check for $500 million, accounting for 86% of the total $580 million raised. Other participants in the same round included Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and James McClave of Jane Street.
The fact that this co-investment list includes Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda; Nishad Singh, FTX’s Head of Engineering; and Jane Street, SBF’s former employer, speaks volumes.
This $580 million Series B round was almost entirely funded by SBF and the pool of funds under his control.
Red Flag and Compromise
Dario Amodei is not stupid.
Later, in an in-depth interview, he recalled that SBF appeared at the time to be “bullish on AI and concerned about safety,” which aligned well with Anthropic’s direction—but then Dario added a crucial point: he noticed “enough red flags.”
So he made a decision: take the money but create a governance separation. SBF received non-voting shares and was excluded from the board. Dario later described SBF’s behavior as “much, much, much more extreme and terrible than I ever imagined,” stacking together three “much more”s.
This decision was later proven to be extremely wise. But it also raised a sharp question: If the warning signs were already so numerous that isolation within the governance structure was necessary, why take it anyway?
The AI funding environment at the beginning of 2022 was far less vibrant than it is today; Anthropic needed substantial capital to build computing power, and finding an investor willing to commit $500 million upfront, regardless of how many “red flags” they had, was not easy.
But there is another, more subtle reason: within the EA community’s operational logic, the “cleanliness” of funding sources has never been a priority. What matters is the “effectiveness” of the funds—whether they enable you to do more. SBF’s entire wealth narrative was built on this premise: making money is the means, doing good is the end, so the methods of earning money don’t need to be pristine, as long as the resulting “good” is substantial enough.
This logic took a criminal extreme in SBF’s hands, but at the moment he invested in Anthropic, it appeared merely as an aggressive yet non-illegal philosophical choice.
After the Collapse: A Black Comedy
The rest of the story is well known in the crypto community.
In November 2022, CoinDesk exposed Alameda’s balance sheet; CZ announced the sale of FTT, triggering a bank run on FTX, and the empire collapsed within nine days. SBF was arrested, extradited, and tried, and in March 2024 was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Anthropic’s 8% equity stake, along with all other assets, has been frozen in the bankruptcy proceedings.
One noteworthy incident excluded by the court during the trial is worth mentioning.
SBF’s defense attorneys attempted to portray Anthropic’s investment as evidence of “vision”: “Look, he wasn’t just squandering money—he made an investment decision whose valuation multiplied several times over.”
Prosecutor Damian Williams responded firmly: Whether these investments were profitable is entirely irrelevant to the charge of fraud. If you steal someone’s money to invest, you’re still stealing—even if you make a profit. The judge sided with the prosecution, and Anthropic’s name was excluded from the trial.
The prosecution added one more blow: Isn’t FTX itself the best example of a cautionary tale? Valued at $18 billion in 2021, $32 billion in 2022, now worth nothing.
Then comes the liquidation auction.
March 2024, first round at an $884 million valuation.
The largest buyer, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala, invested $500 million—exactly matching the amount SBF originally invested. The second-largest buyer was Jane Street, SBF and Caroline Ellison’s former employer, with Jane Street’s quantitative research head Craig Falls even personally contributing $20 million. SBF’s first job after graduating from MIT was as a trader at Jane Street; now, this former employer is purchasing shares that were originally bought with illicit funds by its former employee.
A total of 1.34 billion was recovered across two rounds. This amount has been added to FTX’s creditor repayment pool, serving as a crucial source of funds for affected users to recover their deposits.
What if the liquidation team does not sell?
In February 2026, Anthropic completed its Series G funding round of $30 billion, resulting in a post-money valuation of $380 billion. Without dilution, the 8% stake theoretically increased from $1.34 billion to $30 billion. The liquidation team, of course, did not choose this path—their duty was to liquidate assets as quickly as possible to repay creditors. Yet the disparity between $1.34 billion and the potential $30 billion-plus remains key to understanding why this story is still discussed today.
It was the largest regret in the entire FTX bankruptcy case.
EA's collective amnesia
Anthropic's scale and influence today require no further elaboration, but an interesting phenomenon is that the company is systematically distancing itself from the EA movement.
All seven co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their personal wealth, which, at current valuations, amounts to approximately $38 billion in pledged donations from just these seven founders. Nearly 30 Anthropic employees have signed up for the EA conference in San Francisco—more than double the combined total from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta’s superintelligence lab.
But Daniela Amodei said in an interview with Wired: “I’m not an expert in effective altruism. I don’t identify with that term. My impression is that it’s a somewhat outdated phrase.” The person saying this has a husband who is one of the most influential fund allocators in the EA movement and has just joined her company.
The stance of “taking EA’s money, using EA’s people, living in EA’s shared housing, but refusing to acknowledge being part of EA” has become understandable after the SBF case. The collapse of FTX caused the EA movement’s reputation to hit rock bottom. Anthropic needs to distance itself from this label, just as any smart company would sever ties when its brand faces negative associations.
But the facts are clear: Anthropic’s founding rationale stems from the EA community’s core arguments about AI existential risk; its early funding came almost entirely from within the EA network; and its governance structure is controlled by individuals from the EA system.
Parallel universes in prison
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently in federal prison. He is eligible for release as early as 2049, when he will be 57 years old.
During his time in prison, the AI company he invested his illicit funds into surpassed a $380 billion valuation and is now engaged in a globally watched battle with the Pentagon over the militarization of AI; its founder has become a regular presence in The New York Times and on Capitol Hill. Had everything been legal, that $500 million bet would have made SBF one of the highest-return venture investors of this era.
SBF’s “make money, give money” and Anthropic’s “develop AI safely” share the same underlying operating system: the willingness to accept unusual methods and risks for a sufficiently large good outcome.
SBF pushed this logic past the boundary of crime; Anthropic operates on the safe side of that line, but its core proposition—that “we must build the most powerful AI ourselves to ensure AI’s safety”—is itself a grandiose, nearly self-fulfilling gamble.
They grow in the same soil.
In that same soil, Dario and SBF attended the same gatherings, embraced the same philosophy, and lived on different nodes of the same social network. One went on to build an AI empire valued at $380 billion; the other ended up in federal prison.
And the $500 million check that connected them remains the strangest chapter in Anthropic’s history.