From: Pham Liem via Vaca <vaca+3dm2mxoh_@gaggle.email>
Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 02:34
Subject: [Vaca] The Free Press article on AI scheme
To: VACA Vietnamese American Conservative <vaca@gaggle.email>
Xin lỗi phải dùng cách này, tác giả là executive của Palantir:
The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings A philosophy called effective altruism has shaped today’s AI safety movement. Its proponents claim to be protecting humanity’s future. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says think twice before believing them. “EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IS THE UNSEEN FORCE DRIVING AI SAFETY DISCOURSE,” WRITES SHYAM SANKAR. “AND AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW ABOUT IT, BECAUSE THE EA CROWD IS TRYING TO RESTRICT YOUR ACCESS TO THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY OF THE 21ST CENTURY.” (KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES) By Shyam Sankar In a world with little agreement, there is one thing that unites almost everyone: AI is the most transformative technology of our time. What we don’t agree on is what to do about it. Over the past few days we’ve aired a range of perspectives, from Niall Ferguson and Daniel Kokotajlo on the rising risk of AI catastrophe to Tyler Cowen on why efforts to slow AI won’t necessarily impede progress. But there’s another view of this issue—and especially the developments of the past week—that argues that the warnings from AI researchers and leaders should not be taken at face value. Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir, is an influential member of this camp. In today’s Big Read, he lays out what he sees as the destructive ideology that lies behind calls for safety regulation—and why he believes what looks like a responsible plea to slow progress is actually about taking control out of the hands of the American people. —The Editors If you turned on cable news last week, you might have seen Jacob Coxon, a software engineer who resigned from Anthropic and immediately embarked on a media tour. It all began on September 8, when Coxon warned on X that “[t]he people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” A current employee at a frontier lab chimed in to confirm that, yes, he and many of his co-workers do believe there is a significant chance AI will kill us all. The odds, he said, are perhaps greater than 10 percent. These vague and apocalyptic warnings caused a firestorm online, including calls for AI safety regulations from the leaders of almost every major AI company. But there is reason for skepticism. The warnings from Coxon and others are infused with an ideology called effective altruism EA. The term will be familiar to some: A few years ago, it was the idea that crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried said motivated him. SBF, you may remember, was supposed to be the good billionaire. He was to make a fortune with his company, FTX, and give it away to protect humanity’s future, especially from big, existential risks. Instead, he stole billions from his customers and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Today, EA is the unseen force driving AI safety discourse. Its ideas and money course through institutions seeking to build and govern AI and, with it, America’s future. And Americans deserve to know about it, because the EA crowd is trying to restrict your access to the most important technology of the 21st century. Let me explain. Sam Bankman-Fried explained the EA approach to morality in a 2022 interview: “There’s something very quantitative about how you view the world if you’re thinking about things from a utilitarian perspective,” he said. “In the end, you turn things into numbers, and you decide which number is the biggest.” That approach allowed him to justify enormous fraud in the present for what he believed would produce a better future. Effective altruism is a utilitarian philosophy that claims to use evidence and reason to do good, ranking competing needs through a common calculus. It leads in strange directions. For example, in a truly universal moral frame, effective altruists argue, why should a single country like the United States or a single species like humanity take precedence? According to EA, shrimp welfare is an urgent priority.) Indeed, why should we value ourselves and our children more highly than the countless generations that come after us? The movement is obsessed with quantifying existential risk—a fact that explains why discourse around AI has taken an apocalyptic turn. If tortured thought experiments can show that AI is a risk to humanity for all time, then that risk must outweigh virtually any benefit it can provide to us in the present. The problem is, while EA philosophy claims rationality and precision, it delivers neither. And it could not be further from the views of the American people, who remain stubbornly attached to such things as their country, their children, and their freedom. Join Bari Weiss and Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore for a conversation on the making of the Middle East, live in New York City on October 1. Buy tickets now Consider what it would take to make a true accounting of existential risk. How many people might exist 100 years from now, let alone a million? What probability should we assign to a machine god destroying humanity? How much should people living today sacrifice to change that probability? EA shows how a human life can become a rounding error in somebody else’s calculation of the greater good. Future people cannot challenge the assumptions made in their name. The philosopher appoints himself their representative, then announces that their interests outweigh yours. Putting disputed moral judgments and uncertain prophecies into an equation does not turn them into scientific facts. This is hardly an irrelevant academic exercise. Effective altruism is the belief system of the majority of AI researchers. It is endemic in the AI safety community, across all the labs and nonprofits. William MacAskill, cofounder of the Center for Effective Altruism, helped persuade Bankman-Fried to pursue “earning to give” and later joined the FTX Future Fund team. Discussing EA in 2022, he aligned with Sam.” Today he is a called himself “remarkably co-founder of Forethought, working on preparations for advanced AI, including AI rights and the values of a future society. Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, announced in 2022 that Bankman-Fried had led its $580 million funding round. Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn participated. Tallinn had led Anthropic’s $124 million round the previous year. Avital Balwit, a member of the Future Fund team who resigned when FTX collapsed, is now chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO. The effective altruists are devoting vast sums to push their ideas in America’s institutions. Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), which was founded by leading effective altruist Dustin Moskovitz, says it is on track to commit more than $1 billion in 2026 to AI safety and security. Coefficient is one of several funders of Horizon Institute for Public Service, whose AI fellows have served in Senate offices and federal agencies. Tallinn, the Skype founder, is a well-known effective altruist who has donated roughly $152 million through his Survival and Flourishing Fund, the stated premise of which is that “Without internationally enforced speed limits on AI, humanity is unlikely to survive.” This past weekend, Dario Amodei released his latest proposal, which suggests “pacing the frontier”: government-enabled coordination among frontier AI companies to help control the pace of development. He also invites EA-captured institutions like METR, an organization that evaluates the potential harm of AIs, and a slew of other nonprofits, to help set the conditions under which America advances and to subordinate American interests to supranational governance. AI doesn’t have to belong to a few. It can belong, as it does now, to Americans who are already determining its most productive uses. These are overlapping institutions and fortunes, financing a struggle over who controls the future. The only thing they agree on about the future is that you should not be in control of it. This consolidation of power will have consequences. In the early 20th century, Vladimir Lenin invented the notion of the “vanguard,” a small cadre of revolutionaries with privileged insight into humanity’s future and a special right to force others into compliance. The EA doomsayers are the Leninist vanguard of the algorithmic age: It is for them, they say, to chart the future of this technology, and for us to comply. As in the 20th century, this is a recipe for despair and decline. There are, of course, real risks with AI, as there are with any new technology. But throughout our history, the American people have proven uniquely capable of embracing and mastering new technology. AI doesn’t have to belong to a few. It can belong, as it does now, to Americans who are already determining its most productive uses. Tampa General Hospital, for example, credits its AI-powered sepsis monitoring system with helping save more than 700 lives. The Navy reports an Electric Boat pilot cut a planning task from 160 hours to under 10 minutes. These programs are not eliminating the need for nurses or shipbuilders. They are delivering outcomes that matter and freeing up humans for tasks that only humans can do. This is a revolution, but hardly of the kind that those in the Silicon Valley bubble promise. AI is powerful. That is exactly why we can’t turn our backs on it. It is underwriting the next 250 years of American greatness. It is the antidote to the 20th century’s managerial revolution. It is the most viable path to reestablish the connection between GDP growth and wage growth that broke in 1971. The EA vanguard has operated without public scrutiny so far, but that must change. Our democratic system means they must persuade the rest of us that their policies are sound, instead of short-circuiting debate with fear tactics in a bid for control. Public officials should be careful not to align themselves with the hidden tech oligarchs: Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, and the other billionaire effective altruists. There is a term, often attributed to Lenin, for those who fall into the vanguard’s trap: useful idiots. Americans owe future generations a flourishing, free country. We should insist on the freedom to build it ourselves
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