A look at Dustin Moskovitz's Open Philanthropy, which has spent ~$500M on student scholarships and more at Stanford and other universities to fight rogue AI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mastodon: Baldur Bjarnason / @baldur@toot.cafe : “How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse: A billionaire-backed movement is recruiting college students to fight killer AI, which some see as the next Manhattan Project.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Twitter: Ben Collins / @oneunderscore__ : Good story about the PR campaign behind the “AI Apocalypse” panic, which was supposed to wipe out humanity by now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Dr. Casey Fiesler / @cfiesler : well this is one of the more depressing things I've read in an article about AI lately https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... [image] @basedbeffjezos : If you go to Stanford please just go build an AI wrapper like everyone else rather than drinking the EA/AIXR KoolAid. The world will be better off if the AI safety mind virus doesn't gobble up all the talent that could be impactful for accelerating AI. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @timnitgebru : would be well served to investigate that further and see what needs to be done to stop the harm." Not to mention the piles of money that's being thrown here at OUR cost. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Kontra / @counternotions : “Critics call the AI safety movement unscientific. They say its claims about existential risk can sound closer to a religion than research.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Dustin Moskovitz's Open Philanthropy has put roughly $500M into scholarships and other funding at Stanford and other elite universities, part of a movement the Washington Post describes as recruiting students to fight rogue AI — a cause some critics frame as an 'AI apocalypse' PR campaign with quasi-religious overtones. The campus pipeline sits alongside a parallel Washington track: Open Philanthropy also funds salaries of staff inside Congress and federal agencies to push long-term-risk policymaking, per earlier Politico reporting on its policy push.
The story lands mid-arc for effective altruism, which Bloomberg traced through Silicon Valley's obsession and Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall as its champion in coverage of the movement's doomsday turn. The pause-letter fiasco — signatories walking back, fake names, expert disagreement — had already exposed the credibility gap the Post's sources are now probing.
First-order effects
- Stanford and peer universities become direct recipients of ~$500M in safety-movement money, shaping which students enter AI research and which framing of AI risk they absorb.
- Reporters and academics like Casey Fiesler publicly challenge the movement's scientific standing, putting Open Philanthropy's campus recruiting under reputational scrutiny it did not face when operating through grants alone.
Second-order effects
- With the same funder active on campuses and inside federal agencies, critics can now argue AI risk policy has a single private patron — forcing universities and congressional offices to defend how they accept the money.
- Rival billionaire investors pushing 'unfettered advancement' gain a counter-narrative: the Forbes-tracked fight over whether AI's future is concentrated safety or open development becomes a two-camp contest for legitimacy rather than a technical debate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AI safety becomes institutionally embedded — funded chairs, staffed agencies, recruited cohorts — meaning the field's research agenda is set by philanthropic capital before public regulators arrive, echoing how the Manhattan Project comparison frames AI as a state-scale project run by private money.
- The movement's credibility problem compounds: each exposé of doomsday framing makes the broader case for AI regulation harder to separate from its best-funded advocates, leaving experts divided even as security researchers warn of large-scale destruction potential.
The trend: AI safety is being institutionalized top-down by a single philanthropic funder across campuses and government, turning existential-risk advocacy into a contested political franchise.