vault backup: 2026-09-23 17:56:02

20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Center for AI Safety.md

@@ -19,6 +19,23 @@ relations:
     reverse: true
     role: "executive and research director"
     fn: 1
+  - type: funded
+    with: "[[FTX]]"
+    reverse: true
+    end: 2022
+    role: "6.5 million dollars before its collapse"
+    fn: 10
+  - type: employed_by
+    with: "[[Nathan Calvin]]"
+    reverse: true
+    role: "senior policy counsel, CAIS Action Fund"
+    fn: 10
+  - type: represented
+    with: "[[Varun Krovi]]"
+    reverse: true
+    start: 2023
+    role: "lobbyist for the CAIS Action Fund"
+    fn: 10
 created: 2026-09-22
 updated: 2026-09-23
 ---
@@ -37,6 +54,12 @@ The Center for AI Safety Action Fund is a 501(c)(4), so contributions to it are
 
 Hendrycks, the center's executive and research director, with [[Oliver Zhang]] as managing director,[^1] advises [[Elon Musk]]'s [[xAI]], which he joined in 2023 for a salary of one dollar a year, and [[Scale AI]], which he began advising in 2024 for twelve dollars a year. He told an audience at [[TechCrunch]] Disrupt in October 2025 that he had helped craft SB 1047 and that Musk was the only AI company head to support it: "No other A.I. companies officially supported that bill, and that's because he takes this much more seriously."[^7] In July 2024, as SB 1047 moved through the legislature, the AI security company [[Gray Swan AI]] announced that Hendrycks, one of its advisers, had "decided to divest his entire financial stake in Gray Swan" "to avoid even the appearance of a financial conflict," and would remain an unpaid adviser without equity.[^8] In March 2025 Hendrycks published "Superintelligence Strategy" with the former Google chief executive [[Eric Schmidt]] and Scale AI's founder [[Alexandr Wang]], proposing "Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state's aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals," through means "ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters."[^9]
 
+### Lobbying and FTX
+
+The center and the unaffiliated [[Center for AI Policy]] registered their first federal lobbyists in late 2023. The CAIS Action Fund spent 80,000 dollars on congressional and agency lobbying from October to December 2023 and engaged [[Varun Krovi]], a former chief of staff to Representative [[Brenda Lawrence]], to lead it. Its senior policy counsel, [[Nathan Calvin]], said that Open Philanthropy "has not made any contributions" to the Action Fund, whose lobbying he said was funded by a "mix of donors." *Politico* reported in February 2024 that Open Philanthropy had given the center "more than $10.5 million" since November 2022, a figure below the sum of the four grants listed on Open Philanthropy's grant pages, and that the center had received 6.5 million dollars from the cryptocurrency exchange [[FTX]] before its collapse in late 2022. The bankrupt FTX later "demanded information from CAIS regarding that donation," and Calvin declined to say whether the center would return the money. The center had also partnered with the [[United Kingdom]] on AI risks and was among the first members of the Commerce Department's AI Safety Institute Consortium, announced in February 2024.[^2][^10]
+
+The *Politico* article quoted [[Suresh Venkatasubramanian]], a Brown University professor and co-author of a 2022 White House document on AI's near-term risks: "It's about who has more money, and [who] wants to fund their agenda through infusions of cash from a rich doomsday cult." [[Divyansh Kaushik]] of the [[Federation of American Scientists]] said such organizations were "trying to build more mature efforts to get in front of more members, make arguments that at least sound reasonable."[^10]
+
 ### Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Center for AI Safety, "Statement on AI Risk," May 30, 2023, https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk ; "About Us," https://www.safe.ai/about
@@ -48,3 +71,4 @@ Hendrycks, the center's executive and research director, with [[Oliver Zhang]] a
 [^7]: "Meet the Researcher Elon Musk Pays $1 a Year to Safeguard A.I." *Observer,* October 28, 2025. https://observer.com/2025/10/dan-hendrycks-ai-safety-advisory-xai/
 [^8]: Gray Swan AI, "Statement on SB-1047 and Founders," July 25, 2024. https://www.grayswan.ai/news/sb1047
 [^9]: Hendrycks, Dan, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang. "Superintelligence Strategy: Expert Version." arXiv:2503.05628, March 7, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05628
+[^10]: Bordelon, Brendan. "AI doomsayers funded by billionaires ramp up lobbying." *Politico,* February 23, 2024. http://web.archive.org/web/20240223123509id_/https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/23/ai-safety-washington-lobbying-00142783