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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council.md Normal file
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@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council"
tags:
- Organization
- Anthropic
- NationalSecurity
- IntelligenceCommunity
summary: "Advisory council formed by Anthropic in August 2025 of former senators and defense, intelligence, nuclear and Justice Department officials, including a former deputy CIA director and NSA cybersecurity director."
start: 2025-08-27
relations:
- type: member_of
with: "[[David S. Cohen]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-08-27
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Patrick Shanahan]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-08-27
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Roy Blunt]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-08-27
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Jon Tester]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-08-27
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Richard Fontaine]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-08-27
fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
---
[[Anthropic]] announced the council on August 27, 2025, as "a group of leading bipartisan national security and public policy practitioners who will help Anthropic support the [[U.S. government]] and closely allied democracies in building and maintaining enduring technological advantages in an era of strategic competition," with the task of identifying "high-impact applications" in areas "ranging from cybersecurity to intelligence analysis to scientific research." Its inaugural members were:[^1]
- [[Roy Blunt]], former senator from Missouri and member of the [[Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]], director of Tenet Healthcare and of the cyber company Nightwing, and former chairman of the advisory board of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
- [[David S. Cohen]], former deputy director of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.
- [[Richard Fontaine]], chief executive of the [[Center for a New American Security]], executive director of the [[Trilateral Commission]], former foreign-policy adviser to Senator John McCain, and a member of Anthropic's own [[Long-Term Benefit Trust]].
- [[Christopher Fonzone]], former head of the [[Department of Justice|Justice Department]]'s Office of Legal Counsel and general counsel of the [[Office of the Director of National Intelligence]] under Biden.
- [[Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty]], administrator of the [[National Nuclear Security Administration]] in Trump's first term.
- [[Josh Hodges]], former national security adviser to Speaker [[Mike Johnson]] and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the [[National Security Council]], then an executive at VEON Ltd.
- [[Jill M. Hruby]], administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration under Biden and former director of [[Sandia National Laboratories]].
- [[Mike Kuiken]], former national security adviser to Senate Majority Leader [[Chuck Schumer]] and an adviser to the [[Special Competitive Studies Project]].
- [[Dave Luber]], former director of cybersecurity at the [[National Security Agency]] and executive director of [[United States Cyber Command|U.S. Cyber Command]].
- [[Patrick Shanahan]], former acting Secretary of Defense, chief executive of Spirit AeroSystems and director of [[Leidos]].
- [[Jon Tester]], former senator from Montana and chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, "where he oversaw $800 billion in defense and intelligence spending."
Six months later Anthropic refused the [[Pentagon]]'s demand to drop its exclusions for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, and was designated a supply-chain risk.[^2]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Anthropic, "Introducing the Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council," August 27, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-the-anthropic-national-security-and-public-sector-advisory-council
[^2]: Amodei, Dario. "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War." Anthropic, February 26, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war ; "Amazon says Anthropic's Claude still OK for AWS customers to use outside defense work." *CNBC,* March 6, 2026.

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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Anthropic.md
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@ -7,52 +7,119 @@ tags:
- EffectiveAltruism
- FTX
- AISafety
summary: "Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu around the goal of safe AI development, whose 2022 Series B was led by a 500 million dollar investment from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX before its fraud collapse."
summary: "AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers from the effective-altruism milieu, funded early by Tallinn, Moskovitz and Bankman-Fried, deployed on classified networks, then blacklisted by the Pentagon in 2026."
location: "San Francisco, California"
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Dario Amodei]]"
reverse: true
start: 2021-05
fn: 3
- type: founded
with: "[[Daniela Amodei]]"
reverse: true
start: 2021-05
fn: 3
- type: funded
with: "[[Jaan Tallinn]]"
reverse: true
start: 2021-05
role: "led the 124-million-dollar Series A"
fn: 12
- type: funded
with: "[[Dustin Moskovitz]]"
reverse: true
start: 2021-05
role: "Series A"
fn: 12
- type: funded
with: "[[Amazon (company)|Amazon]]"
reverse: true
start: 2023-09
role: "up to 8 billion dollars"
fn: 15
- type: partner_of
with: "[[Palantir Technologies]]"
start: 2024-11
role: "Claude on classified networks with AWS"
fn: 18
- type: contractor_to
with: "[[Department of Defense]]"
start: 2025-07-14
end: 2026-03-05
role: "CDAO prototype agreement up to 200 million dollars; designated a supply-chain risk"
fn: 20
created: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Anthropic is an artificial-intelligence company founded in May 2021 by seven former [[OpenAI]] researchers, led by the siblings [[Dario Amodei]] (chief executive) and [[Daniela Amodei]] (president), who left OpenAI over disagreements about its direction and its balance between commercialization and safety. The founders came out of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and built the company explicitly around the thesis that advanced AI should be developed with extreme caution, the same existential-risk concern that runs through the [[Rationalist Community]] and the institutions [[Peter Thiel]] funded through the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]]. Its 2022 funding round was led by a 500 million dollar investment from [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] months before his [[FTX]] exchange collapsed in fraud.[^1][^2]
### Founding and Governance
The Amodeis and their cofounders, including [[Tom Brown]], [[Jack Clark]], [[Jared Kaplan]], [[Sam McCandlish]], and [[Chris Olah]], incorporated Anthropic as a public-benefit corporation and built an unusual governance structure, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, intended to give a body insulated from shareholders the power to appoint directors and to weight safety over profit. The arrangement mirrored the nonprofit-control structure that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis. Daniela Amodei is married to [[Holden Karnofsky]], cofounder of the effective-altruism organizations [[GiveWell]] and [[Open Philanthropy]], which was an early Anthropic funder; Karnofsky later joined the company.[^2][^3]
The Amodeis and their cofounders, including [[Tom Brown]], [[Jack Clark]], [[Jared Kaplan]], [[Sam McCandlish]], and [[Chris Olah]], incorporated Anthropic as a public-benefit corporation and built an unusual governance structure, the [[Long-Term Benefit Trust]], intended to give a body insulated from shareholders the power to appoint directors and to weight safety over profit. The arrangement mirrored the nonprofit-control structure that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis. Daniela Amodei is married to [[Holden Karnofsky]], cofounder of the effective-altruism organizations [[GiveWell]] and [[Open Philanthropy]], which was an early Anthropic funder; Karnofsky later joined the company.[^2][^3]
The Long-Term Benefit Trust was formally established in September 2023, holding a special class of stock (Class T shares) that gives it authority to elect and remove Anthropic directors on time- and funding-based milestones, phasing up to a majority of the board within four years. Its five founding trustees were [[Neil Buddy Shah]] of the [[Clinton Health Access Initiative]] as chair, [[Jason Matheny]] of the [[RAND Corporation]], [[Kanika Bahl]] of [[Evidence Action]], the alignment researcher [[Paul Christiano]] of the [[Alignment Research Center]], and [[Zach Robinson]] of [[Effective Ventures US]], several of them figures from the effective-altruism and AI-safety world. Matheny stepped down in December 2023 to avoid conflicts with RAND's policy work, and Christiano left in April 2024 to lead AI safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute, with the trust later adding [[Richard Fontaine]] of the Center for a New American Security and the former California Supreme Court justice [[Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar]].[^6][^7]
The Long-Term Benefit Trust was formally established in September 2023, holding a special class of stock (Class T shares) that gives it authority to elect and remove Anthropic directors on time- and funding-based milestones, phasing up to a majority of the board within four years. Its five founding trustees were [[Neil Buddy Shah]] of the [[Clinton Health Access Initiative]] as chair, [[Jason Matheny]] of the [[RAND Corporation]], [[Kanika Bahl]] of [[Evidence Action]], the alignment researcher [[Paul Christiano]] of the [[Alignment Research Center]], and [[Zach Robinson]] of [[Effective Ventures US]], several of them figures from the effective-altruism and AI-safety world. Matheny stepped down in December 2023 to avoid conflicts with RAND's policy work, and Christiano left in April 2024 to lead AI safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute, with the trust adding [[Richard Fontaine]], chief executive of the [[Center for a New American Security]] and executive director of the [[Trilateral Commission]], in May 2025, and [[Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar]], president of the [[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]], in January 2026. Bahl and Robinson left in January 2026, and the former [[Federal Reserve Board|Federal Reserve]] chairman [[Ben Bernanke]] joined in July 2026. With the trust's appointment of Novartis's chief executive, [[Vas Narasimhan]], in April 2026, trust-appointed directors became a majority of the board, which also included Yasmin Razavi, Jay Kreps, [[Reed Hastings]] and, from February 2026, [[Chris Liddell]], a former chief financial officer of Microsoft and General Motors and deputy [[White House]] chief of staff in [[Donald Trump]]'s first term.[^4][^5][^6][^7]
### FTX Funding and the Effective-Altruism Tie
In 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried invested approximately 500 million dollars in Anthropic's Series B through his trading firm [[Alameda Research]], taking about 86 percent of the round and roughly 8 percent of the company; the money came from FTX customer deposits. Dario Amodei has said he kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares because of "red flags." After the FTX fraud was exposed and Bankman-Fried convicted, the FTX bankruptcy estate sold the stake, and Amodei moved to distance himself and the company from the effective-altruism label even as the founders remained products of that milieu. Later funding rounds drew on [[Google]] and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]], carrying the company's valuation into the tens of billions of dollars.[^1][^4][^5]
In 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried invested approximately 500 million dollars in Anthropic's Series B through his trading firm [[Alameda Research]], taking about 86 percent of the round and roughly 8 percent of the company; the money came from FTX customer deposits. Dario Amodei has said he kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares because of "red flags." After the FTX fraud was exposed and Bankman-Fried convicted, the FTX bankruptcy estate sold the stake, and Amodei moved to distance himself and the company from the effective-altruism label even as the founders remained products of that milieu. Later funding rounds drew on [[Google]] and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]], carrying the company's valuation into the tens of billions of dollars.[^1][^8][^9]
The April 2022 Series B that Bankman-Fried led raised 580 million dollars at a 4-billion-dollar valuation, with FTX cofounder [[Caroline Ellison]] also named in the round. The FTX estate disposed of the 8 percent stake in 2024 as Anthropic's value climbed: a March 2024 agreement sold about two-thirds of the shares (29.5 million shares to 24 buyers) for 884 million dollars, with ATIC Third International Investment Company, tied to the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund [[Mubadala]], buying roughly 500 million dollars of it and [[Jane Street Capital]], Fidelity-managed funds, and HOF Capital among the rest; a June 2024 sale of the remaining shares brought in over 450 million dollars. Anthropic's May 2023 Series C, led by [[Spark Capital]] with Google, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, had raised 450 million dollars, and the stake FTX paid 500 million dollars for would have been worth several billion at later valuations.[^8][^9]
The April 2022 Series B that Bankman-Fried led raised 580 million dollars at a 4-billion-dollar valuation, with FTX cofounder [[Caroline Ellison]] also named in the round. The FTX estate disposed of the 8 percent stake in 2024 as Anthropic's value climbed: a March 2024 agreement sold about two-thirds of the shares (29.5 million shares to 24 buyers) for 884 million dollars, with ATIC Third International Investment Company, tied to the [[Abu Dhabi]] sovereign fund [[Mubadala]], buying roughly 500 million dollars of it and [[Jane Street Capital]], Fidelity-managed funds, and HOF Capital among the rest; a June 2024 sale of the remaining shares brought in over 450 million dollars. Anthropic's May 2023 Series C, led by [[Spark Capital]] with Google, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, had raised 450 million dollars, and the stake FTX paid 500 million dollars for would have been worth several billion at later valuations.[^10][^11]
### The Funding Rounds
Anthropic's first outside capital was a 124-million-dollar Series A in May 2021 led by [[Jaan Tallinn]], the Estonian programmer who had made his fortune as a founding engineer of [[Skype]], with participation from the investor [[James McClave]], [[Dustin Moskovitz]], [[Eric Schmidt]], and the [[Center for Emerging Risk Research]]. The lead and several of the backers came from the same effective-altruism and existential-risk donor world as the founders. The 580-million-dollar Series B that Bankman-Fried led the following year was followed in May 2023 by a 450-million-dollar Series C led by Spark Capital.[^10]
Anthropic's first outside capital was a 124-million-dollar Series A in May 2021 led by [[Jaan Tallinn]], the Estonian programmer who had made his fortune as a founding engineer of [[Skype]], with participation from the investor [[James McClave]], [[Dustin Moskovitz]], [[Eric Schmidt]], and the [[Center for Emerging Risk Research]]. The lead and several of the backers came from the same effective-altruism and existential-risk donor world as the founders. The 580-million-dollar Series B that Bankman-Fried led the following year was followed in May 2023 by a 450-million-dollar Series C led by Spark Capital.[^12]
From 2023 the valuation climbed through a rapid sequence of rounds funded increasingly by the largest technology firms and the late-stage growth funds. A March 2025 round of 3.5 billion dollars, led by [[Lightspeed Venture Partners]], valued the company at 61.5 billion dollars. In May 2026 it closed a 65-billion-dollar round, the largest in its history, at a 965-billion-dollar post-money valuation, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, [[Sequoia Capital]], Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital, briefly making it the most valuable private company in the artificial-intelligence industry, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic reported an annualized revenue run rate of about 47 billion dollars and confidentially filed for an initial public offering in mid-2026.[^11][^12]
From 2023 the valuation climbed through a rapid sequence of rounds funded increasingly by the largest technology firms and the late-stage growth funds. A March 2025 round of 3.5 billion dollars, led by [[Lightspeed Venture Partners]], valued the company at 61.5 billion dollars. In May 2026 it closed a 65-billion-dollar round, the largest in its history, at a 965-billion-dollar post-money valuation, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, [[Sequoia Capital]], Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital, briefly making it the most valuable private company in the artificial-intelligence industry, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic reported an annualized revenue run rate of about 47 billion dollars and confidentially filed for an initial public offering in mid-2026.[^13][^14]
### The Amazon and Google Stakes
The two largest strategic investors are Amazon and Google, which are also Anthropic's principal cloud and chip suppliers. Amazon committed up to 4 billion dollars in September 2023, beginning with 1.25 billion, and added a further 4 billion in November 2024 to reach 8 billion dollars in total, becoming Anthropic's primary training partner through [[Amazon Web Services]] and its Trainium chips. Google, which had put roughly 300 million dollars into the company for about a 10 percent stake in early 2023, committed up to 2 billion dollars later that year and more than 1 billion again in January 2025, holding a stake reported at around 14 percent and contractually capped near 15 percent.[^13][^14]
The two largest strategic investors are Amazon and Google, which are also Anthropic's principal cloud and chip suppliers. Amazon committed up to 4 billion dollars in September 2023, beginning with 1.25 billion, and added a further 4 billion in November 2024 to reach 8 billion dollars in total, becoming Anthropic's primary training partner through [[Amazon Web Services]] and its Trainium chips. Google, which had put roughly 300 million dollars into the company for about a 10 percent stake in early 2023, committed up to 2 billion dollars later that year and more than 1 billion again in January 2025, holding a stake reported at around 14 percent and contractually capped near 15 percent.[^15][^16]
The arrangement is partly circular: much of the money the two companies invest returns to them as payment for the computing capacity Anthropic rents to train and run its models. By 2026 the appreciation of the two stakes was large enough that the financial press reported the Anthropic holdings accounted for roughly half of the AI-related investment gains Google and Amazon booked in some quarters, gains the companies had not realized because they had not sold the shares.[^14][^15]
The arrangement is partly circular: much of the money the two companies invest returns to them as payment for the computing capacity Anthropic rents to train and run its models. By 2026 the appreciation of the two stakes was large enough that the financial press reported the Anthropic holdings accounted for roughly half of the AI-related investment gains Google and Amazon booked in some quarters, gains the companies had not realized because they had not sold the shares.[^16][^17]
### National Security Work
In November 2024 Anthropic, [[Palantir Technologies]] and Amazon Web Services announced a partnership to bring Claude to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies on classified networks at Impact Level 6; Palantir's chief technology officer, [[Shyam Sankar]], said it gave them "the tool chain they need to harness and deploy AI models securely."[^18] In June 2025 the company introduced "Claude Gov" models "built exclusively for U.S. national security customers," already deployed "by agencies at the highest level of U.S. national security," which "refuse less when engaging with classified information."[^19] On July 14, 2025, the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI prototype agreements worth up to 200 million dollars each.[^20] In August 2025 Anthropic formed a [[Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council|National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council]] whose inaugural members included the former deputy [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] director [[David S. Cohen]], the former [[NSA]] cybersecurity director Dave Luber, the former acting Secretary of Defense [[Patrick Shanahan]], the former senators [[Roy Blunt]] and [[Jon Tester]], the former ODNI general counsel Christopher Fonzone, two former administrators of the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the trust member Richard Fontaine.[^21]
### The Pentagon Dispute
On February 26, 2026, Dario Amodei published a statement that Claude was "extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies" for "intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more," and that Anthropic had been "the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks." The department, he wrote, would contract only with companies that accepted "any lawful use," and had threatened to remove Anthropic from its systems, to designate it a "supply chain risk" and to invoke the Defense Production Act unless it dropped two exclusions, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons: "we cannot in good conscience accede to their request."[^22] President Trump then ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology, and on March 5 the department told the company it would be labeled a supply-chain risk; Amazon said its cloud customers could keep using Claude for all work not associated with the department.[^23] According to *The Intercept,* which obtained more than 400 pages of the contract documents through a [[Freedom of Information Act]] lawsuit, the break came over amendments that would have allowed deployment on classified networks without prohibitions on domestic spying and autonomous weapons; Secretary of Defense [[Pete Hegseth]]'s designation was overturned by a federal judge in August 2026, and the department quickly reached classified-network agreements with Google, OpenAI and xAI.[^24]
### Political Spending and Lobbying
On February 12, 2026, Anthropic announced a 20-million-dollar contribution to [[Public First Action]], "a new bipartisan 501(c)(4)" founded by Republican and Democratic strategists, noting that "vast resources have flowed to political organizations that oppose these efforts."[^25] Eight days later *TechCrunch* reported, citing *Bloomberg,* that Public First Action was "spending $450,000 to boost" New York Assembly member [[Alex Bores]], sponsor of the state's RAISE Act, in the Democratic primary for the 12th congressional district, where the super PAC [[Leading the Future]], backed by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], [[Greg Brockman]] of OpenAI, [[Perplexity]] and [[Joe Lonsdale]], had spent 1.1 million dollars on ads attacking him.[^26] On July 21, 2026, Anthropic gave another 20 million dollars, "bringing our total support to $40 million," and stated that both donations "cannot be used to influence the election of any candidate for federal, state, or local office."[^27]
Anthropic's own lobbying disclosures reported expenses of 720,000 dollars in 2024, 4.04 million in 2025 and 3.53 million in the first half of 2026; the number of outside firms registered to lobby for it grew from two in 2023 to nine in 2026.[^28]
### Footnotes
[^1]: "From 500 million to 30 billion: SBF, in prison, has invested in the most valuable company in the AI era," on the FTX/Alameda investment in Anthropic. https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/019d08f7-792c-70db-a0d3-5654dd2b2eaf
[^2]: "Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival, has a weird structure too," *Slate,* December 2023, on Anthropic's effective-altruism origins and the Long-Term Benefit Trust. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/anthropic-openai-board-trust-effective-altruism.html
[^3]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on the founding and the Karnofsky and Open Philanthropy ties. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
[^4]: "Dario Amodei's Ideological Reckoning: How Anthropic's CEO Is Distancing Himself From the Movement That Made Him," *WebProNews,* on the post-FTX distancing from effective altruism. https://www.webpronews.com/dario-amodeis-ideological-reckoning-how-anthropics-ceo-is-distancing-himself-from-the-movement-that-made-him/
[^5]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction November 2, 2023; FTX estate disposition of the Anthropic stake reported in subsequent bankruptcy filings.
[^6]: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," Anthropic, September 2023, on the Class T shares, the four-year board-majority phase-in, and the founding trustees. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
[^7]: "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust," Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 28, 2023, on the trustee roster and the Matheny and Christiano departures. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/10/28/anthropic-long-term-benefit-trust/
[^8]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 29.5 million shares, 24 buyers, ATIC/Mubadala, Jane Street, Fidelity, and HOF Capital. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html
[^9]: "Anthropic raises $3.5 billion with new funding round," Techzine, on the April 2022 Series B (580 million dollars, 4-billion valuation, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison) and the May 2023 Spark Capital Series C. https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/129278/anthropic-raises-3-5-billion-with-new-funding-round/
[^10]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems
[^11]: "Anthropic reaches $61.5B valuation after latest funding round," Seeking Alpha, March 2025, on the 3.5-billion-dollar round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a 61.5-billion-dollar valuation. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4416449-anthropic-reaches-61_5b-valuation-after-latest-funding-round
[^12]: "Anthropic raises $65 billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO," TechCrunch, May 28, 2026, on the 65-billion-dollar round at a 965-billion-dollar valuation co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1, the 47-billion-dollar revenue run rate, and the value surpassing OpenAI; and "Anthropic confidentially files for IPO after raising $65 billion," Fortune, June 1, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/
[^13]: "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic: $8B bet to power the future of AI," Tech Funding News, on Amazon's September 2023 commitment of up to 4 billion dollars and the additional 4 billion in November 2024 for 8 billion total through Amazon Web Services and Trainium. https://techfundingnews.com/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment-strategy/
[^14]: "Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic," CNBC, January 22, 2025, on Google's roughly 300 million dollars for about 10 percent in early 2023, the up-to-2-billion-dollar commitment, the further more-than-1-billion in January 2025, and the stake reported near 14 percent capped at 15 percent. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/google-agrees-to-new-1-billion-investment-in-anthropic.html
[^15]: "Half of Google's and Amazon's 'blowout AI profits' came from a stake in Anthropic, not from their actual business," Fortune, April 30, 2026, on the unrealized gains from the Anthropic stakes and the cloud-payment arrangement. https://fortune.com/2026/04/30/google-amazon-ai-profits-anthropic-stake-bubble-earnings-2026/
[^4]: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," Anthropic, September 2023, on the Class T shares, the four-year board-majority phase-in, and the founding trustees. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
[^5]: "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust," Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 28, 2023, on the trustee roster and the Matheny and Christiano departures. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/10/28/anthropic-long-term-benefit-trust/
[^6]: Anthropic, "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," September 19, 2023, with later updates on trustee changes. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
[^7]: Anthropic, "Chris Liddell appointed to Anthropic's board of directors," February 13, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-liddell-appointed-anthropic-board ; "Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust appoints Vas Narasimhan to Board of Directors," April 14, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/narasimhan-board
[^8]: "Dario Amodei's Ideological Reckoning: How Anthropic's CEO Is Distancing Himself From the Movement That Made Him," *WebProNews,* on the post-FTX distancing from effective altruism. https://www.webpronews.com/dario-amodeis-ideological-reckoning-how-anthropics-ceo-is-distancing-himself-from-the-movement-that-made-him/
[^9]: *United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried,* S.D.N.Y., conviction November 2, 2023; FTX estate disposition of the Anthropic stake reported in subsequent bankruptcy filings.
[^10]: "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE," *CNBC,* March 25, 2024, on the 29.5 million shares, 24 buyers, ATIC/Mubadala, Jane Street, Fidelity, and HOF Capital. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-stake-in-startup-anthropic-for-884-million.html
[^11]: "Anthropic raises $3.5 billion with new funding round," Techzine, on the April 2022 Series B (580 million dollars, 4-billion valuation, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison) and the May 2023 Spark Capital Series C. https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/129278/anthropic-raises-3-5-billion-with-new-funding-round/
[^12]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems
[^13]: "Anthropic reaches $61.5B valuation after latest funding round," Seeking Alpha, March 2025, on the 3.5-billion-dollar round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a 61.5-billion-dollar valuation. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4416449-anthropic-reaches-61_5b-valuation-after-latest-funding-round
[^14]: "Anthropic raises $65 billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO," TechCrunch, May 28, 2026, on the 65-billion-dollar round at a 965-billion-dollar valuation co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1, the 47-billion-dollar revenue run rate, and the value surpassing OpenAI; and "Anthropic confidentially files for IPO after raising $65 billion," Fortune, June 1, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/
[^15]: "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic: $8B bet to power the future of AI," Tech Funding News, on Amazon's September 2023 commitment of up to 4 billion dollars and the additional 4 billion in November 2024 for 8 billion total through Amazon Web Services and Trainium. https://techfundingnews.com/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment-strategy/
[^16]: "Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic," CNBC, January 22, 2025, on Google's roughly 300 million dollars for about 10 percent in early 2023, the up-to-2-billion-dollar commitment, the further more-than-1-billion in January 2025, and the stake reported near 14 percent capped at 15 percent. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/google-agrees-to-new-1-billion-investment-in-anthropic.html
[^17]: "Half of Google's and Amazon's 'blowout AI profits' came from a stake in Anthropic, not from their actual business," Fortune, April 30, 2026, on the unrealized gains from the Anthropic stakes and the cloud-payment arrangement. https://fortune.com/2026/04/30/google-amazon-ai-profits-anthropic-stake-bubble-earnings-2026/
[^18]: "Anthropic partners with AWS and Palantir to provide AI models to defense agencies." *SiliconANGLE,* November 7, 2024. https://siliconangle.com/2024/11/07/anthropic-partners-aws-palantir-provide-ai-models-defense-agencies/
[^19]: Anthropic, "Claude Gov models for U.S. national security customers," June 6, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-gov-models-for-u-s-national-security-customers
[^20]: "Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI granted up to $200 million for AI work from Defense Department." *CNBC,* July 14, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-granted-up-to-200-million-from-dod.html
[^21]: Anthropic, "Introducing the Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council," August 27, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-the-anthropic-national-security-and-public-sector-advisory-council
[^22]: Amodei, Dario. "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War." Anthropic, February 26, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
[^23]: "Amazon says Anthropic's Claude still OK for AWS customers to use outside defense work." *CNBC,* March 6, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/06/amazon-aws-anthropic-claude-pentagon-blacklist.html
[^24]: "AI Giants Work Hand-in-Hand With the Pentagon, Contracts Reveal." *The Intercept,* September 8, 2026. https://theintercept.com/2026/09/08/military-ai-weapons-contracts-openai-anthropic-google/
[^25]: Anthropic, "Anthropic is donating $20 million to Public First Action," February 12, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/donate-public-first-action
[^26]: Bellan, Rebecca. "Anthropic-funded group backs candidate attacked by rival AI super PAC." *TechCrunch,* February 20, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/20/anthropic-funded-group-backs-candidate-attacked-by-rival-ai-super-pac/
[^27]: Anthropic, "Anthropic is donating another $20 million to Public First Action," July 21, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/donation-public-first-action
[^28]: U.S. Senate, Lobbying Disclosure Act database, filings with client "Anthropic," 2023 to second quarter 2026, retrieved September 2026. https://lda.senate.gov/api/v1/filings/?client_name=Anthropic

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---
category: "Private Organization"
aliases:
- "Asana, Inc."
tags:
- Organization
- Technology
- DustinMoskovitz
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
summary: "Work-management software company founded in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, controlled by Moskovitz, whose board long included OpenAI director Adam D'Angelo and which buys AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic."
start: 2008
location: "San Francisco, California"
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Dustin Moskovitz]]"
reverse: true
start: 2008
fn: 1
- type: founded
with: "[[Justin Rosenstein]]"
reverse: true
start: 2008
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Adam D'Angelo]]"
reverse: true
role: "director"
start: 2008-12
end: 2026
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Matthew Cohler]]"
reverse: true
role: "director"
start: 2009-11
end: 2026
fn: 1
- type: funded
with: "[[Sam Altman]]"
reverse: true
start: 2016
role: "led a 50-million-dollar investment"
fn: 2
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Asana was co-founded by [[Dustin Moskovitz]], who had been chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at [[Facebook]], and [[Justin Rosenstein]], a former Facebook engineering manager and [[Google]] product manager. Moskovitz has been a director since December 2008 and chairman since December 2019, and was chief executive from October 2010 to July 2025, chief financial officer from 2009 to 2017 and secretary from 2009 to 2017. [[Dan Rogers]], formerly chief executive of LaunchDarkly, succeeded him as chief executive in July 2025.[^1] In 2016 [[Sam Altman]] led a 50-million-dollar investment in the company.[^2]
### Control
According to the company's 2026 proxy statement, Moskovitz held 38.6 percent of the Class A and 87.0 percent of the Class B common stock, 74.2 percent of the total voting power, through direct holdings, the Dustin A. Moskovitz Trust of December 27, 2005, a Roth IRA and 1,720,916 Class A shares held by the [[Good Ventures|Good Ventures Foundation]], on whose board "Mr. Moskovitz and his spouse serve as directors." On September 7, 2022, he acquired 19,273,127 Class A shares in a private placement, granting Asana an irrevocable proxy over them.[^1]
### The Board
[[Adam D'Angelo]], founder and chief executive of [[Quora]] and Facebook's chief technology officer from 2006 to 2008, was a director of Asana from December 2008 and did not stand for re-election in 2026. [[Matthew Cohler]], a partner at [[Benchmark Capital]] since 2008, a former Facebook vice president of product management and a director of [[KKR]], was a director from November 2009 and resigned in 2026. [[Andrew Lindsay]], a director since 2021, is a corporate vice president at [[Microsoft]].[^1] D'Angelo was also a director of [[OpenAI]]; in October 2023 *[[Politico]]* noted that Asana and OpenAI shared him as a board member.[^2]
### Related-Party Transactions
The 2026 proxy statement listed among related-person transactions for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2026: 300,000 dollars of AI services bought from OpenAI, noting that "Adam D'Angelo, a member of our Board, is a member of OpenAI's Board of Directors," and 300,000 dollars of Asana subscriptions sold to OpenAI; 1.1 million dollars of AI services bought from [[Anthropic]], noting that "Dustin Moskovitz, Chairman of our Board of Directors and our former Chief Executive Officer, has a minority ownership interest in Anthropic," and 600,000 dollars of subscriptions sold to it; subscriptions sold to Quora, the [[Environmental Defense Fund]], of which Cohler is a trustee, and [[Gusto]]; and advertising bought from Microsoft and rent paid to [[HubSpot]], on whose board the lead independent director, [[Lorrie Norrington]], sits.[^1]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Asana, Inc. Schedule 14A definitive proxy statement, filed April 20, 2026, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000162828026025998/asan-20260420.htm
[^2]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362

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---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "CAIS"
- "Center for AI Safety Action Fund"
- "CAIS Action Fund"
tags:
- Organization
- AISafety
- OpenPhilanthropy
- EffectiveAltruism
- Lobbying
- SB1047
summary: "San Francisco AI-safety nonprofit directed by Dan Hendrycks, funded by Open Philanthropy, which organized the 2023 extinction-risk statement; its 501(c)(4) arm co-sponsored SB 1047 and lobbied for the AI Safety Institute."
location: "San Francisco, California"
relations:
- type: head_of
with: "[[Dan Hendrycks]]"
reverse: true
role: "executive and research director"
fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
The Center for AI Safety describes its mission as "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence" through research, field-building and advocacy, and runs a compute cluster that it says supports about 20 research labs.[^1] [[Open Philanthropy]] recommended grants to it of 5,160,000 dollars for general support in November 2022, 4,025,729 dollars for general support, 1,433,000 dollars for the CAIS Philosophy Fellowship, and a final "Exit Grant" of 1,866,559 dollars in October 2023.[^2]
### The Extinction Statement
On May 30, 2023, CAIS published a one-sentence "Statement on AI Risk": "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Its signatories included [[Geoffrey Hinton]], [[Yoshua Bengio]], [[Demis Hassabis]] of [[Google DeepMind]], [[Sam Altman]] of [[OpenAI]] and [[Dario Amodei]] of [[Anthropic]].[^1] The *[[Politico]]* reporter [[Brendan Bordelon]] noted in October 2023 that the letter had been organized by a group that "received a $5.2 million grant from Open Philanthropy late last year."[^3]
### The Action Fund
The Center for AI Safety Action Fund is a 501(c)(4), so contributions to it are not tax-deductible, and it describes itself as "dedicated to advancing public policies that maintain U.S. leadership in AI and protect against AI-related national security threats."[^4] Its report on 2024, its first year, stated that it "led a bipartisan congressional effort" with Representatives [[Haley Stevens]] and [[Jay Obernolte]] and Senators [[Martin Heinrich]] and [[Mike Rounds]] that "secured $10 million to establish" the [[National Institute of Standards and Technology]]'s [[U.S. AI Safety Institute]]; that it "co-sponsored California Senate Bill 1047," which the legislature passed and Governor [[Gavin Newsom]] vetoed; that it advised the [[White House]] and the Commerce Department on the "AI Diffusion" export-control rule; and that it worked with the office of Senate Majority Leader [[Chuck Schumer]] on the SAFE Innovation Framework. A photograph of its Capitol Hill launch event in the report shows [[Jaan Tallinn]], co-founder of [[Skype]].[^5] Heinrich and Rounds each had an AI fellow paid through the Open Philanthropy-funded [[Horizon Institute for Public Service]].[^3] In April 2024 [[Gina Raimondo]] named [[Paul Christiano]], a former technical adviser to Open Philanthropy and an original trustee of Anthropic's [[Long-Term Benefit Trust]], head of AI safety at the institute.[^6]
### Dan Hendrycks
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]
### 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
[^2]: Open Philanthropy, "Center for AI Safety, General Support (2022)," with related grants listed, archived October 23, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20251023205051/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/center-for-ai-safety-general-support/
[^3]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362
[^4]: Center for AI Safety Action Fund, home page. https://action.safe.ai/
[^5]: Center for AI Safety Action Fund, "2024 Annual Impact Report." https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/66438c042d15b14b53b83006/68012dcfec6880aba24f528a_CAIS-ActionFund-ImpactReport_05.pdf
[^6]: National Institute of Standards and Technology, "U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo Announces Expansion of U.S. AI Safety Institute Leadership Team," April 16, 2024, https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/04/us-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-announces-expansion-us-ai-safety ; Open Philanthropy, "OpenAI, General Support," March 2017, archived January 1, 2025, http://web.archive.org/web/20250101012608/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/ ; Anthropic, "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," September 19, 2023. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
[^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

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@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "CSET"
- "Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology"
tags:
- Organization
- ThinkTank
- Georgetown
- OpenPhilanthropy
- ArtificialIntelligence
- NationalSecurity
summary: "Georgetown think tank on emerging technology and national security, launched in 2019 under former IARPA director Jason Matheny with 55 million dollars from Open Philanthropy, its main funder."
start: 2019-01
location: "Washington, D.C."
relations:
- type: funded
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
reverse: true
start: 2019-01
role: "55 million dollars over five years, raised by 42 million in 2021 to more than 100 million through 2025"
fn: 1
- type: part_of
with: "[[Georgetown University]]"
role: "Walsh School of Foreign Service"
fn: 2
- type: head_of
with: "[[Dewey Murdick]]"
reverse: true
role: "director of data science, then director"
start: 2021-03
fn: 4
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
---
The Center for Security and Emerging Technology is a policy research center in [[Georgetown University]]'s [[Walsh School of Foreign Service]]. [[Open Philanthropy]] recommended a grant of 55 million dollars over five years in January 2019 to launch it as "a new think tank dedicated to policy analysis at the intersection of national and international security and emerging technologies," led by [[Jason Matheny]], former director of the [[Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity]]. The grant investigator was [[Luke Muehlhauser]]. The founding team named on the grant page included [[Dewey Murdick]], director of data science, formerly chief analytics officer and deputy chief scientist at the [[Department of Homeland Security]] and an IARPA program manager; [[William Hannas]], lead analyst, formerly a member of the Senior Intelligence Service at the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and "the [[Open Source Enterprise]]'s primary China science and technology analyst," who had also served with the [[Foreign Broadcast Information Service]]; and [[Helen Toner]], director of strategy and plans, previously a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy.[^1]
### Funding
In August 2021 CSET announced that "its main funder," Open Philanthropy, had increased its grant by 42 million dollars, bringing total funding to more than 100 million dollars through 2025; Murdick also credited the [[William and Flora Hewlett Foundation]], the P[[ublic Interest Technology University Network]] and [[Georgetown]].[^2] In October 2023 the *[[Politico]]* reporter [[Brendan Bordelon]] described CSET as "funded almost entirely by Open Philanthropy," and reported that Open Philanthropy also paid the salaries of fellows at CSET through the [[Horizon Institute for Public Service]], a nonprofit he wrote that Open Philanthropy had "effectively created in 2022."[^3]
### Staff
Matheny left in March 2021 for the [[White House]], where he took technology and national security posts at the [[National Security Council]] and the [[Office of Science and Technology Policy]]; Murdick became interim director.[^4] Toner, later CSET's director of strategy and foundational research grants, was a director of [[OpenAI]] when its board removed [[Sam Altman]] in November 2023.[^5] Murdick testified alongside the RAND researcher [[Jeff Alstott]] on long-term AI risks.[^3]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Open Philanthropy, "Georgetown University, Center for Security and Emerging Technology," grant of January 2019, archived January 2, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250102035307/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/georgetown-university-center-for-security-and-emerging-technology/
[^2]: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, "New Grant Agreement Boosts CSET Funding to More than $100 Million Through 2025," August 25, 2021. https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/new-grant-agreement-boosts-cset-funding-to-more-than-100-million-over-five-years/
[^3]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362
[^4]: "Jason Matheny to serve Biden White House in national security and tech roles." *FedScoop,* March 9, 2021. https://fedscoop.com/white-house-announces-top-tech-adviser-jason-matheny-national-security/
[^5]: "Former OpenAI board member explains why CEO Sam Altman got fired before he was rehired." *CNBC,* May 29, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/29/former-openai-board-member-explains-why-ceo-sam-altman-was-fired.html

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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Father Bud's Boys Farm.md
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@ -15,27 +15,22 @@ location: "Roarks Cove, near Alto, Tennessee"
start: 1971
end: 1976
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Claudius Vermilye]]"
reverse: true
start: 1971
fn: 2
created: 2026-04-28
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Boys Farm, Inc., known as Father Bud's Boys Farm, was founded in 1971 by the Rev. [[Claudius Vermilye]], formerly rector of the Episcopal church at Alto, Tennessee, as a rehabilitation center for wayward boys in the Roarks Cove community near Alto; national wire reports placed it at Winchester and the investigator [[Kenneth Wooden]] at Monteagle. The boys were sent there by the state correction department, juvenile authorities and welfare agencies, and the farm was partly financed with state and county funds.[^2][^3][^4][^5]
Boys Farm, Inc., known as Father Bud's Boys Farm, was founded in 1971 by the Rev. [[Claudius Vermilye]], formerly rector of the Episcopal church at Alto, Tennessee, as a rehabilitation center for wayward boys in the Roarks Cove community near Alto; national wire reports placed it at Winchester and the investigator [[Kenneth Wooden]] at Monteagle. The boys were sent there by the state correction department, juvenile authorities and welfare agencies, and the farm was partly financed with state and county funds.[^1][^2][^3][^4]
Films found on the Michigan photographer [[Gerald Richards]] at his arrest in July 1976 and films seized in the [[New Orleans]] raid on [[Troop 137]] led Tennessee authorities to raid the farm after they recognized some of the "actors"; Vermilye's name had also turned up in the files of the New Orleans scoutmaster [[Richard Halvorsen]]. The raid produced films of sexual acts between boys at the farm and a list of more than 270 "active sponsors," among them [[Francis Shelden]], owner of [[North Fox Island]]. District Attorney General [[J. William Pope]] said the boys were shown obscene films and given liquor before orgies filmed with a hidden camera, that films were sold to sponsors to raise money for the farm, and that some sponsors came to the farm to have sex with the boys. Half a dozen Illinois men had bought films from Vermilye, one for more than 4,000 dollars. Richards testified that the farm "sold raw film to other men. They would bring it to me to process." An investigator for the district attorney general, Pete Bouldin, described the [[The Church of New Revelation|Church of the New Revelation]], one of the network's fronts, as a "referral agency which distributes pornography around the country"; Boys Farm, Inc., was listed as a separate organization from the church. Vermilye was convicted on June 3, 1977.[^2][^3][^4][^6]
Films found on the Michigan photographer [[Gerald Richards]] at his arrest in July 1976 and films seized in the [[New Orleans]] raid on [[Troop 137]] led Tennessee authorities to raid the farm after they recognized some of the "actors"; Vermilye's name had also turned up in the files of the New Orleans scoutmaster [[Richard Halvorsen]]. The raid produced films of sexual acts between boys at the farm and a list of more than 270 "active sponsors," among them [[Francis Shelden]], owner of [[North Fox Island]]. District Attorney General [[J. William Pope]] said the boys were shown obscene films and given liquor before orgies filmed with a hidden camera, that films were sold to sponsors to raise money for the farm, and that some sponsors came to the farm to have sex with the boys. Half a dozen Illinois men had bought films from Vermilye, one for more than 4,000 dollars. Richards testified that the farm "sold raw film to other men. They would bring it to me to process." An investigator for the district attorney general, Pete Bouldin, described the [[The Church of New Revelation|Church of the New Revelation]], one of the network's fronts, as a "referral agency which distributes pornography around the country"; Boys Farm, Inc., was listed as a separate organization from the church. Vermilye was convicted on June 3, 1977.[^1][^2][^3][^5]
### The Distribution Network
The writer S. Dovey wrote that film was mailed from the farm to Richards for development and distribution through MAIL-O-MATIC in [[North Carolina]] and F&S Distributors in California. Dovey also wrote that the farm was raided on November 10, 1976, and reported the next day by the *Detroit Free Press* as a national pornography hub, and that it was incorporated under the Church of the New Revelation, through which it was linked to [[Dyer Grossman]] and [[Adam Starchild]], and connected through a letter from Vermilye to Halvorsen with Troop 137 and with the Chicago network of [[John David Norman]], the [[Delta Project]] and the [[Odyssey Network]].[^1]
The writer S. Dovey wrote that film was mailed from the farm to Richards for development and distribution through MAIL-O-MATIC in [[North Carolina]] and F&S Distributors in California. Dovey also wrote that the farm was raided on November 10, 1976, and reported the next day by the *Detroit Free Press* as a national pornography hub, and that it was incorporated under the Church of the New Revelation, through which it was linked to [[Dyer Grossman]] and [[Adam Starchild]], and connected through a letter from Vermilye to Halvorsen with Troop 137 and with the Chicago network of [[John David Norman]], the [[Delta Project]] and the [[Odyssey Network]].[^6]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. The incorporation under the Church of the New Revelation and the letter to Halvorsen are not borne out by the hearing record, which lists Boys Farm, Inc., separately and records only Vermilye's name in Halvorsen's files.
[^2]: "Former Clergyman Is Convicted of Acts Against His Wards." United Press International, *The New York Times,* June 4, 1977, p. 33. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/04/archives/former-clergyman-is-convicted-of-acts-against-his-wards.html
[^3]: Wright, Marilyn. *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1976-1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^4]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977, and in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^5]: Testimony of Kenneth Wooden, in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977.
[^6]: Testimony of Gerald S. Richards, May 27, 1977, in *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* 1977, p. 41. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^1]: "Former Clergyman Is Convicted of Acts Against His Wards." United Press International, *The New York Times,* June 4, 1977, p. 33. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/04/archives/former-clergyman-is-convicted-of-acts-against-his-wards.html
[^2]: Wright, Marilyn. *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1976-1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^3]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977, and in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^4]: Testimony of Kenneth Wooden, in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977.
[^5]: Testimony of Gerald S. Richards, May 27, 1977, in *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* 1977, p. 41. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^6]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. The incorporation under the Church of the New Revelation and the letter to Halvorsen are not borne out by the hearing record, which lists Boys Farm, Inc., separately and records only Vermilye's name in Halvorsen's files.

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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Good Ventures.md
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@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
---
category: "Private Organization"
aliases:
- "Good Ventures Foundation"
- "Good Ventures LLC"
tags:
- Organization
- GoodVentures
@ -8,40 +11,72 @@ tags:
- EffectiveAltruism
- OpenPhilanthropy
- Philanthropy
alias:
- Good Ventures Foundation
summary: "Good Ventures is the foundation founded in 2011 by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and the journalist Cari Tuna that, through its partnership with GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, became the dominant funder of the effective-altruism, global-health, and AI-safety grant ecosystem."
location: "San Francisco, California"
summary: "Private foundation of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, founded in 2011 within a web of LLCs and donor-advised funds, which built GiveWell Labs into Open Philanthropy and held about 10 billion dollars in 2025."
start: 2011
location: "Palo Alto, California"
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Dustin Moskovitz]]"
reverse: true
start: 2011
fn: 1
- type: founded
with: "[[Cari Tuna]]"
reverse: true
start: 2011
fn: 1
- type: head_of
with: "[[Cari Tuna]]"
reverse: true
role: "president, later also board chair"
fn: 2
- type: member_of
with: "[[Divesh Makan]]"
reverse: true
role: "director"
fn: 2
- type: funded
with: "[[GiveWell]]"
start: 2011
role: "first grant, 50,000 dollars; about 60 percent of the money GiveWell had moved by 2018"
fn: 1
- type: funded
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
role: "nearly all of its grant money"
fn: 6
created: 2026-06-20
updated: 2026-06-20
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Good Ventures is a private philanthropic foundation established in 2011 by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife, the former journalist [[Cari Tuna]]. Its partnership with the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]] produced [[Open Philanthropy]] (renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025), and the foundation supplies nearly all of that organization's grant money, making the Moskovitz and Tuna fortune the dominant and most durable financial source behind the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, evidence-based global health and development, and AI-safety research.[^1][^2]
Good Ventures is the private foundation of [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]]. When the couple became the youngest billionaires to sign the [[Giving Pledge]], in 2010, he was a 26-year-old Harvard dropout who had made his fortune in four years at Facebook as its first chief technology officer, and she was a 25-year-old Yale graduate reporting for *[[The Wall Street Journal]]* on the California economy. With Moskovitz occupied with Asana, Tuna quit journalism to manage their giving, and they founded Good Ventures in 2011. Moskovitz's net worth was estimated at about 14.3 billion dollars at the end of 2017, and the couple said they intended to give away nearly all of it in their lifetimes; he said, "Cari and I are stewards of this capital. It's pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world."[^1]
### The 2011 Founding
### Filings and Officers
Moskovitz, who retained roughly two percent of Facebook at its 2012 public offering and built a second fortune at the workplace-software company Asana, and Tuna, who had been a reporter at the *Wall Street Journal*, created Good Ventures in 2011 as the vehicle for giving away the bulk of their wealth. They were among the youngest signatories of the [[Giving Pledge]], the Bill Gates and [[Warren Buffett]] commitment to donate the majority of one's fortune, signing in 2014 in their late twenties and early thirties. Tuna served as president of the foundation and became the public face of the operation, articulating a "give where it does the most good" framework that delegated cause selection to a professional research staff applying cost-effectiveness analysis rather than to the donors' personal sentiment.[^1][^3]
The Good Ventures Foundation, EIN 46-1008520, received its tax exemption in March 2013 and files its returns in care of [[Apercen Partners]] LLC at 314 Lytton Avenue, Palo Alto. The officers on every return since 2015 have been Tuna, president and later also board chair; Moskovitz, secretary and treasurer; and [[Divesh Makan]], director, none of them paid; the 2025 return also lists [[Tom Van Loben Sels]] as assistant secretary.[^2] Makan is the sole member of the general partner of [[ICONIQ Capital]], the [[San Francisco]] investment firm.[^3]
Almost immediately the new foundation oriented itself around GiveWell, the charity evaluator that [[Holden Karnofsky]] and [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded in 2007 after working as investment analysts at [[Bridgewater Associates]], the world's largest hedge fund. Good Ventures made its first grant, of 50,000 dollars, to GiveWell itself in 2011, and in the same year directed a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. Tuna joined GiveWell's board in 2011, formalizing the relationship. In 2012 GiveWell relocated its office and five-person staff from New York to San Francisco to be closer to Tuna and other technology donors, and Good Ventures and GiveWell announced a close partnership that June.[^1][^4]
### The Structure
### GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy
In 2018 the *[[Stanford Social Innovation Review]]* writer [[Marc Gunther]] counted seven entities in which Tuna served as a director or major donor: the Open Philanthropy Project LLC, which recommended grants; the [[Open Philanthropy Action Fund]], a 501(c)(4) "that supports nonpartisan advocacy"; the Open Philanthropy Project fund, a donor-advised fund at the [[Silicon Valley Community Foundation]]; the Good Ventures Foundation, which made grants and investments; Good Ventures, a supporting organization also at the community foundation; Good Ventures LLC, "a for-profit impact investment firm"; and [[GiveWell]]. [[Alexander Berger]] of Open Philanthropy told him that "each has a reason for being" and that "tax considerations are key." Gunther wrote that grants made through the donor-advised funds "can't be traced back to the original donors," that the entities disclosed some but not all of their investments, and that Open Philanthropy did not disclose its operating costs or the pay of its highest-paid staff. Outside these structures, Moskovitz and Tuna were investors in [[Bill Gates]]'s [[Breakthrough Energy Ventures]].[^1] The Open Philanthropy Action Fund has reported paying outside lobbyists every year from 2021 through 2026, [[Tarplin, Downs & Young]] and [[Arnold & Porter]] in 2021 and the [[Kyle House Group]] from 2023, on foreign relations, health and appropriations.[^4]
The partnership produced a joint research project called GiveWell Labs, launched in 2012 to look for giving opportunities beyond the direct-aid global-health charities that GiveWell already recommended. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and was spun off from GiveWell as a separate organization in June 2017, though the two retained overlapping boards and staff and shared office space in downtown San Francisco. The split divided two functions: GiveWell continued recommending a short list of proven, measurable charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, and harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale made possible, including pandemic preparedness, farm-animal welfare, scientific research, and the prevention of catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence.[^1][^4]
### GiveWell and Open Philanthropy
Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence both organizations have acknowledged. The longtermist and AI-risk portion of that giving flowed to the research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to [[OpenAI]] in 2017 that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, and later became an early investor in the AI company [[Anthropic]]. Karnofsky, who served as co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]]. The [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] briefly funded the same longtermist and AI-safety field in 2022 before evaporating when FTX collapsed that November.[^2][^5]
A friend introduced Tuna to [[Holden Karnofsky]], who with [[Elie Hassenfeld]] had founded the charity evaluator GiveWell in 2007 after working at the hedge fund [[Bridgewater Associates]]. Tuna joined GiveWell's board in 2011. Good Ventures' first grant, of 50,000 dollars, went to GiveWell that year, with another 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities, chiefly the [[Against Malaria Foundation]] and the [[Schistosomiasis Control Initiative]]. By 2018 Good Ventures accounted for about 60 percent of the estimated 375 million dollars GiveWell had moved to its recommended charities. In 2012 GiveWell moved its office and staff of five from New York to San Francisco "to be closer to Tuna and other technology-industry donors."[^1] The joint project [[Open Philanthropy|GiveWell Labs]], launched in 2012, was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and spun off from GiveWell in June 2017, keeping overlapping boards and staff and shared offices.[^1][^5] Good Ventures gave 70.4 million dollars through GiveWell in 2015, 50.4 million in 2016 and 75.1 million in 2017.[^5]
### The Dominant Funder
Open Philanthropy, renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025, draws nearly all of its grant money from Good Ventures.[^6] Its grantees include [[OpenAI]], which received 30 million dollars in 2017 with a board seat for Karnofsky; the [[Center for Security and Emerging Technology]]; the [[RAND Corporation]]; the [[Center for AI Safety]]; [[Redwood Research]]; the [[Horizon Institute for Public Service]], which pays technology fellows placed in Congress and federal agencies; and the [[Tarbell Center for AI Journalism]], which pays journalists placed in newsrooms.[^7] It had given away about 7 billion dollars by September 2026.[^8]
By the mid-2010s Good Ventures had become by far the largest single donor channeling money through GiveWell, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the estimated 375 million dollars GiveWell had moved to its favored organizations, with annual Good Ventures grants of 70.4 million dollars in 2015, 50.4 million in 2016, and 75.1 million in 2017. As of August 2022 the foundation reported having granted more than 1.7 billion dollars across global health and development, farmed-animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and other cause areas. By 2025 Moskovitz and Tuna had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative giving since 2011, including more than 600 million dollars in 2025 alone, with Good Ventures making 493 grants in 2024 at a median grant size of about 115,000 dollars.[^1][^2][^6]
### Assets
The concentration of so much AI-safety and effective-altruism funding under a single foundation drew sustained criticism. Because Good Ventures funds much of the research community that examines the AI labs, and because Open Philanthropy was an early investor in Anthropic, observers argued that the field scrutinizing the AI companies depended financially on one donor couple who were also early backers of one of those companies. When Open Philanthropy rebranded as Coefficient Giving in November 2025 and began running multi-donor funds that other philanthropists could join, Good Ventures remained its founding and most significant ongoing partner and the source of the bulk of its capital.[^2][^7]
The foundation's assets were 27 million dollars in the fiscal year ending June 2013, 1.02 billion in 2017, 3.34 billion in 2020, 5.86 billion in 2023 and 10.11 billion in 2025. Contributions received were 1.02 billion dollars in fiscal 2020, 1.91 billion in 2023, 801 million in 2024 and 1.40 billion in 2025, when it also reported 847 million dollars from sales of assets and paid 338 million dollars in charitable disbursements.[^2] In 2026 it held 1,720,916 Class A shares of Asana, the company Moskovitz controls; Asana's proxy statement said that Moskovitz and "his spouse serve as directors on the board of Good Ventures Foundation and may be deemed to have shared voting and dispositive power" over them. The same proxy disclosed that Asana bought 1.1 million dollars of AI services from [[Anthropic]], in which Moskovitz "has a minority ownership interest."[^9] In April 2026 the *[[Washington Examiner]]* reported that in 2025 Moskovitz had transferred his Anthropic stake, "which had reportedly grown to roughly $500 million, to his charity to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interests," without naming the entity.[^10]
### Footnotes
[^1]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on the 2011 founding of Good Ventures, the first 50,000-dollar grant to GiveWell, the additional 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities in 2011, Tuna joining the GiveWell board, the 2012 San Francisco relocation, GiveWell Labs, and the 60-percent share of GiveWell's 375 million dollars moved. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum, on Good Ventures as the primary funder of Open Philanthropy. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin
[^3]: "Cari Tuna," EA Forum topic entry on Good Ventures and the Giving Pledge. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/cari-tuna
[^4]: "Our Progress," GiveWell, on GiveWell Labs launching in 2012, its August 2014 rename to the Open Philanthropy Project, and the June 2017 spin-off; annual Good Ventures grant totals of 70.4 million dollars (2015), 50.4 million (2016), and 75.1 million (2017). https://www.givewell.org/about/progress
[^5]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder, the 2017 OpenAI grant and board seat, and the Karnofsky-Amodei marriage. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
[^6]: "Moskovitz & Tuna: $600M Donated in 2025, Over $4B Total Since 2011," IndexBox, on the 4-billion-dollar cumulative total, the 600 million in 2025, and the 493 grants in 2024 at a 115,000-dollar median. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/dustin-moskovitz-cari-tunas-4b-philanthropy-journey/
[^7]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename and the multi-donor expansion with Good Ventures as the founding partner. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
[^1]: Gunther, Marc. "Giving in the Light of Reason." *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* Summer 2018. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
[^2]: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "Good Ventures Foundation," EIN 46-1008520, Form 990-PF data for fiscal years ending June 2013 to June 2025, updated August 20, 2026. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/461008520
[^3]: ICONIQ Capital, LLC, and others, Schedule 13G regarding Diameter Credit Co, November 13, 2024, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1916099/000101143824000605/form_sc13g-diameter.htm
[^4]: U.S. Senate, Lobbying Disclosure Act database, filings for client "Open Philanthropy Action Fund," 2021 to 2026, retrieved September 2026. https://lda.senate.gov/api/v1/filings/?client_name=Open+Philanthropy+Action+Fund
[^5]: GiveWell, "Our Progress," on GiveWell Labs, the 2014 rename, the 2017 spin-off and annual Good Ventures totals. https://www.givewell.org/about/progress
[^6]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
[^7]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023, http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362 ; Open Philanthropy, "OpenAI, General Support," March 2017, archived January 1, 2025, http://web.archive.org/web/20250101012608/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/ ; Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, "Ethics and Standards policies," February 20, 2026. https://www.tarbellcenter.org/ethics-and-standards
[^8]: Smith, Ben. "Coefficient Giving's CEO on Silicon Valley's $40 billion philanthropy boom." *Semafor,* September 3, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/09/03/2026/coefficient-givings-ceo-on-silicon-valley-40-billion-philanthropy-boom
[^9]: Asana, Inc. Schedule 14A definitive proxy statement, filed April 20, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000162828026025998/asan-20260420.htm
[^10]: Schmad, Robert. "Documents show how a tech-connected nonprofit shaped Biden-era AI policy." *Washington Examiner,* April 17, 2026. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/4532389/

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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Horizon Institute for Public Service.md Normal file
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---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "Horizon Institute"
- "Horizon Fellowship"
tags:
- Organization
- OpenPhilanthropy
- EffectiveAltruism
- ArtificialIntelligence
- Congress
- Biosecurity
summary: "Nonprofit founded in 2022 that pays technology fellows placed in congressional offices, federal agencies and think tanks; Politico reported Open Philanthropy had effectively created it."
start: 2022
location: "Washington, D.C."
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Remco Zwetsloot]]"
reverse: true
start: 2022
fn: 1
- type: funded
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
reverse: true
start: 2022
role: "initial operations; nearly 3 million dollars set aside for the first cohort"
fn: 1
- type: funded
with: "[[Joe Lonsdale]]"
reverse: true
role: "Lonsdale Family Philanthropic Fund"
fn: 2
- type: member_of
with: "[[Jason Matheny]]"
reverse: true
role: "advisory board"
fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
The Horizon Institute for Public Service was founded as a 501(c)(3) public charity in 2022 by [[Remco Zwetsloot]] and [[Joan Gass]]. In its words, its "founding was inspired by the initial success of [[Open Philanthropy]]'s [[Technology Policy Fellowship]]," and it was "grateful to Open Philanthropy for supporting Horizon's initial operations." Its flagship program, the Horizon Fellowship, "places fully-funded fellows at federal agencies, congressional offices, and think tanks." In March 2023 its first cohort was serving at the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, the Senate Commerce and House Science committees, member offices, and the [[Center for Security and Emerging Technology]], the [[Johns Hopkins University|Johns Hopkins]] [[Center for Health Security]] and the [[Center for Strategic and International Studies]].[^1] Zwetsloot had been on the founding team of what he called "DC's first AI policy-focused think tank."[^2]
### Advisers and Funders
Horizon's advisory board in 2023 comprised [[Kari Bingen]], former deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence and security; [[Beth Cameron]], former senior director for global health security and biodefense at the [[National Security Council]]; [[Richard Danzig]], former Secretary of the Navy; [[Michael Kratsios]], then managing director at [[Scale AI]] and former chief technology officer of the [[United States]]; [[Jason Matheny]], chief executive of the [[RAND Corporation]] and former director of IARPA; [[Nadia Schadlow]], former deputy national security adviser for strategy; Lieutenant General (ret.) [[Jack Shanahan]], inaugural director of the [[Pentagon]]'s [[Joint Artificial Intelligence Center]]; and [[Andrew Weber]], former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.[^1] Its later adviser list described Shanahan as "former inaugural Director of [[Project Maven]] and the Joint AI Center."[^2]
Horizon says it takes no government or corporate money and that "no foundation or donor provides a majority of our funding." It lists as funders [[Helena]], [[Renaissance Philanthropy]], the [[Maurice Amado Foundation]], the [[Policy Entrepreneurs Network]], the [[Lonsdale Family Philanthropic Fund]] of the [[Palantir Technologies|Palantir]] co-founder [[Joe Lonsdale]], [[Coefficient Giving]] (the renamed Open Philanthropy), the [[Navigation Fund]], the[[ David and Lucile Packard Foundation]], [[Fulcrum Science]], the [[John Quincy Adams Society]] and [[Sentinel Bio]].[^2]
### The Politico Report
On October 13, 2023, the *[[Politico]]* reporter [[Brendan Bordelon]] reported that Horizon was "a nonprofit that Open Philanthropy effectively created in 2022," that "in 2022, Open Philanthropy set aside nearly $3 million to pay for what ultimately became the initial cohort of Horizon fellows," and that Horizon fellows worked in the offices of Senators [[Martin Heinrich]], [[Mike Rounds]] and [[Todd Young]], the three senators [[Chuck Schumer]] had put in charge of AI legislation, and of Senator [[Richard Blumenthal]], whose AI fellow had worked at [[OpenAI]] immediately before coming to Congress. Photographs from the closed-door [[Senate AI Insight Forum]] of September 2023 showed at least two Horizon fellows, from the Rounds and Heinrich offices, in attendance. The [[Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970]] allows nonprofits to pay the salaries of fellows working in Congress and the executive branch.[^3]
An Open Philanthropy spokesperson, [[Mike Levine]], told Bordelon that Horizon "originally started the fellowship as consultants to Open Phil until they could launch their own legal entity and pay fellows' salaries directly," but that Open Philanthropy "did not play an active role in screening, training, or placement of fellows." Bordelon reported that an Open Philanthropy Google document last updated in August 2022 said the fellowship would consider candidates "who share Open Philanthropy's interests in global catastrophic risks and technology's long-term impacts." Zwetsloot said the program was "not for the pursuit of particular policy goals" and did not screen applicants for their views on AI risk. [[Tim Stretton]] of the [[Project On Government Oversight]] called it "a conflict of interest," and [[David Skaggs]], former chairman of the [[Office of Congressional Ethics]], compared it to "a parallel situation in which [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] had some ostensibly arm's-length foundation funding foreign policy experts for Hill offices." Spokespeople for Blumenthal, Heinrich and Young said the senators made their own policy decisions.[^3]
In December 2025 *[[Semafor]]* reported that Open Philanthropy had "been bothered by media coverage of it, in particular a series of critical stories from Politico," had hired experienced political communications staff, and had renamed itself Coefficient Giving.[^4]
### Export Controls
In November 2025 the *[[Washington Examiner]]* reporter Robert Schmad wrote that two of Horizon's own fellow profiles mentioned export controls: a fellow at the [[House Foreign Affairs Committee]] had done work "supporting export controls," and a fellow at the [[Bureau of Industry and Security]] had researched "export controls and their ability to mitigate converged AI and bio risks"; both received offers to stay in government. Senator [[Jim Banks]], who hosted a Horizon fellow, introduced the GAIN AI Act in August 2025 to give American buyers priority for advanced chips, and his office had drafted letters with that of Senator [[Elizabeth Warren]] on [[Nvidia]]'s dealings with China; Banks's office did not answer whether the fellow played a role. Horizon told the paper: "Horizon helps policymakers access deeply needed technical talent, and we do not take or advance particular policy positions."[^5]
In September 2026 the publication *Effort*, founded by [[Brian Chau]], wrote that Horizon had "received over $12M from Open Philanthropy/Coefficient Giving," that "EA fellowships have placed over 50 staffers in Congress and the administrative branch," and that Horizon's standard base offer had risen from 105,000 dollars for the 2023 cohort to 130,000 dollars for 2027. It quoted an unnamed senior staffer in a Republican senator's office: "He went to Democrat policy meetings, and tried to hand Democrat policies to [the Senator he worked for]." It wrote, citing a former employee of the [[Foundation for American Innovation]], that Horizon's former strategy and partnerships director, [[Sophia Brown]], had been hired into the Trump administration's [[Center for AI Standards and Innovation]] under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act through that foundation.[^6]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Horizon Institute for Public Service, "Update on the Horizon Institute for Public Service," March 8, 2023. https://horizonpublicservice.org/update-on-the-horizon-institute-for-public-service/
[^2]: Horizon Institute for Public Service, "About Us," accessed September 2026. https://horizonpublicservice.org/about-us/
[^3]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362
[^4]: Tani, Max. "AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsrooms." *Semafor,* December 7, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2025/ai-critics-funded-ai-coverage-at-top-newsrooms
[^5]: Schmad, Robert. "Effective Altruism-linked nonprofit placed fellows in key government offices, secured influence." *Washington Examiner,* November 6, 2025. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3874805/effective-altruism-linked-nonprofit-placed-fellows-in-key-government-offices-secured-influence/
[^6]: Effort. "Effective Altruism is Buying Political Staff." September 19, 2026. https://www.effort.news/aisi

60
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Long-Term Benefit Trust.md Normal file
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---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust"
- "LTBT"
tags:
- Organization
- Anthropic
- Governance
- EffectiveAltruism
summary: "Body of financially disinterested trustees empowered to elect a growing share of Anthropic's board, founded in 2023 with trustees from RAND, Effective Ventures and the AI-safety world; a board majority from 2026."
start: 2023-09-19
relations:
- type: head_of
with: "[[Neil Buddy Shah]]"
reverse: true
role: "chair"
start: 2023-09
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Jason Matheny]]"
reverse: true
start: 2023-09
end: 2023-12
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Zach Robinson]]"
reverse: true
start: 2023-09
end: 2026-01
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Richard Fontaine]]"
reverse: true
start: 2025-05
fn: 1
- type: member_of
with: "[[Ben Bernanke]]"
reverse: true
start: 2026-07
fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
The Long-Term Benefit Trust is the governance body of [[Anthropic]], announced on September 19, 2023, as "an independent body of five financially disinterested members with an authority to select and remove a portion of our Board that will grow over time (ultimately, a majority of our Board)." An earlier version, the "Long-Term Benefit Committee," had been written into the Series A investment documents of 2021. The structure was designed with [[John Morley]] of [[Yale Law School]], lawyers from [[Wilson Sonsini]], and [[Noah Feldman]] and [[Seth Berman]] of [[Harvard Law School]] and [[Ethical Compass Advisors]].[^1]
### Trustees
The initial trustees were [[Jason Matheny]], chief executive of the [[RAND Corporation]]; [[Kanika Bahl]], chief executive of [[Evidence Action]]; [[Neil Buddy Shah]], chief executive of the [[Clinton Health Access Initiative]], as chair; [[Paul Christiano]], founder of the [[Alignment Research Center]]; and [[Zach Robinson]], interim chief executive of [[Effective Ventures]] US. Matheny stepped down in December 2023 "to preempt any potential conflicts of interest that might arise with RAND Corporation's policy-related initiatives," and Christiano in April 2024 to become head of AI safety at the U.S. [[AI Safety Institute]]. [[Richard Fontaine]], chief executive of the [[Center for a New American Security]], joined in May 2025; [[Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar]], president of the [[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]], in January 2026, when Bahl and Robinson left; and [[Ben Bernanke]], former chairman of the [[Federal Reserve Board|Federal Reserve]], in July 2026.[^1] Fontaine also sat on Anthropic's [[Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council|National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council]].[^2]
### The Board
In April 2026 the trust appointed [[Vas Narasimhan]], chief executive of [[Novartis]], to Anthropic's board, and with his appointment "Trust-appointed directors now make up a majority of the Board."[^3]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Anthropic, "The Long-Term Benefit Trust," September 19, 2023, with later updates on changes in the trust's composition. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
[^2]: Anthropic, "Introducing the Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council," August 27, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-the-anthropic-national-security-and-public-sector-advisory-council
[^3]: Anthropic, "Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust appoints Vas Narasimhan to Board of Directors," April 14, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/narasimhan-board

22
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Ocean Living Institute.md
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@ -12,28 +12,18 @@ summary: "Tax-exempt corporation formed in Delaware in 1974, ostensibly for ocea
location: "New Jersey, USA"
start: 1974
relations:
- type: head_of
with: "[[Adam Starchild]]"
reverse: true
role: "president"
fn: 2
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Dyer Grossman]]"
reverse: true
role: "executive director"
fn: 2
created: 2026-04-28
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
The Ocean Living Institute was incorporated in Delaware in 1974, with its principal place of business in [[New Jersey]], ostensibly to promote education and research in oceanography. [[Adam Starchild]] was listed as its president and [[Dyer Grossman]] as its executive director. The Internal Revenue Service granted it an "automatic" tax exemption, as it did the [[The Church of New Revelation|Church of the New Revelation]], without challenging or investigating its claim to be a charitable organization. [[Gerald Richards]], organizer of [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] on [[North Fox Island]], told police that the institute, the church and the Educational Foundation for Youth of Illinois had been set up as tax dodges and used as fronts for the production of child pornography; Starchild said they might have been "used" for that purpose by Grossman.[^2]
The Ocean Living Institute was incorporated in Delaware in 1974, with its principal place of business in [[New Jersey]], ostensibly to promote education and research in oceanography. [[Adam Starchild]] was listed as its president and [[Dyer Grossman]] as its executive director. The Internal Revenue Service granted it an "automatic" tax exemption, as it did the [[The Church of New Revelation|Church of the New Revelation]], without challenging or investigating its claim to be a charitable organization. [[Gerald Richards]], organizer of [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] on [[North Fox Island]], told police that the institute, the church and the Educational Foundation for Youth of Illinois had been set up as tax dodges and used as fronts for the production of child pornography; Starchild said they might have been "used" for that purpose by Grossman.[^1]
At Richards's arrest in July 1976 police found a letter from Grossman proposing "child care" sites in Michigan, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia, observing that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, state agencies up to 400 and federal agencies up to 700, and that profits would be greatest if each site were set up under the church or the Educational Foundation for Youth because of their tax exemptions.[^2]
At Richards's arrest in July 1976 police found a letter from Grossman proposing "child care" sites in Michigan, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia, observing that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, state agencies up to 400 and federal agencies up to 700, and that profits would be greatest if each site were set up under the church or the Educational Foundation for Youth because of their tax exemptions.[^1]
### The Grossman Letter
The writer S. Dovey wrote that Richards handed over the letter in August 1976, postmarked July 19, 1976, with the institute's return address, and that it mentioned a twelve-year-old boy Grossman had obtained through a Big Brother program. The writer S. Dovey described the institute as a sea-steading project. Dovey also wrote that Starchild was Malcolm Willis McConahy, an offshore tax attorney who faked his death in 1975, and a scoutmaster in Minneapolis expelled in 1965.[^1]
The writer S. Dovey wrote that Richards handed over the letter in August 1976, postmarked July 19, 1976, with the institute's return address, and that it mentioned a twelve-year-old boy Grossman had obtained through a Big Brother program. The writer S. Dovey described the institute as a sea-steading project. Dovey also wrote that Starchild was Malcolm Willis McConahy, an offshore tax attorney who faked his death in 1975, and a scoutmaster in Minneapolis expelled in 1965.[^2]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It gives New Jersey as the state of incorporation; Starchild's continued activity under that name in 1976 to 1985 is documented in the federal trust litigation.
[^2]: Wright, Marilyn. "Porno Ring Uses Church, Tax Laws." *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 86-87. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^1]: Wright, Marilyn. "Porno Ring Uses Church, Tax Laws." *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 86-87. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^2]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It gives New Jersey as the state of incorporation; Starchild's continued activity under that name in 1976 to 1985 is documented in the federal trust litigation.

82
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Open Philanthropy.md
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@ -1,5 +1,9 @@
---
category: "Private Organization"
aliases:
- "Coefficient Giving"
- "Open Philanthropy Project"
- "GiveWell Labs"
tags:
- Organization
- OpenPhilanthropy
@ -7,30 +11,82 @@ tags:
- Longtermism
- ArtificialIntelligence
- DustinMoskovitz
summary: "Open Philanthropy is the grantmaking organization funded by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna that became the durable financial backbone of effective altruism and AI-safety work, directing more than four billion dollars and serving as an early funder of Anthropic."
summary: "Grantmaker of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, renamed Coefficient Giving in 2025, which has given away about 7 billion dollars and funded CSET, RAND's AI work, Horizon fellows and Tarbell journalists."
location: "San Francisco, California"
start: 2011
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Dustin Moskovitz]]"
reverse: true
start: 2011
fn: 1
- type: founded
with: "[[Cari Tuna]]"
reverse: true
start: 2011
fn: 1
- type: head_of
with: "[[Holden Karnofsky]]"
reverse: true
role: "chief executive"
fn: 6
- type: head_of
with: "[[Alexander Berger]]"
reverse: true
role: "chief executive"
start: 2023
fn: 1
- type: funded
with: "[[OpenAI]]"
start: 2017-03
role: "30 million dollars, with a board seat for Karnofsky"
fn: 5
- type: funded
with: "[[RAND Corporation]]"
start: 2023-04
role: "5.5 million and 10.5 million dollars at Matheny's discretion"
fn: 8
- type: funded
with: "[[Center for AI Safety]]"
start: 2022-11
role: "5.16 million dollars in 2022, then 4.03 million and 1.43 million, and a 1.87-million-dollar exit grant in October 2023"
end: 2023-10
fn: 9
- type: funded
with: "[[Redwood Research]]"
start: 2025-11
role: "36 million dollars"
fn: 1
created: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization, funded chiefly by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]], that became the durable financial backbone of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and of [[Longtermism|longtermist]] and AI-safety work. Where the [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] was the movement's flashiest and most short-lived funder, Open Philanthropy is its largest sustained one, directing more than four billion dollars in grants by 2025. It was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], and its longtime co-chief executive [[Holden Karnofsky]] later moved into AI-safety work and is married to Anthropic president [[Daniela Amodei]].[^1][^2]
Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization funded chiefly by [[Facebook]] and [[Asana]] cofounder [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and his wife [[Cari Tuna]], whose founders and many early employees, according to *[[Semafor]]*, "were sympathetic to the utilitarian philosophical movement known as [[Effective Altruism|effective altruism]]." Known earlier as GiveWell Labs, it was launched in 2011, and the couple's fortune has contributed most of the roughly 7 billion dollars it had given away by September 2026. It renamed itself Coefficient Giving in November 2025. Its chief executive since 2023, [[Alexander Berger]], said in 2026 that it had spent about a tenth of the [[Gates Foundation]]'s budget in 2025 and more than twice that so far in 2026; *Semafor* reported it was on track to give away 2 billion dollars in the year and called it "a favorite of Anthropic executives."[^1][^2]
### Origins
The organization grew out of [[GiveWell]], the charity evaluator Karnofsky cofounded with [[Elie Hassenfeld]], and Good Ventures, the foundation Moskovitz and Tuna established in 2011. The two joined to form the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014, which began independent operations in 2017. Tuna, a former *Wall Street Journal* reporter, and Moskovitz, who made his fortune as one of the earliest Facebook employees and the cofounder of the software firm Asana, committed the bulk of their wealth to the effort.[^1][^3]
The organization grew out of [[GiveWell]], the charity evaluator [[Holden Karnofsky]] cofounded with [[Elie Hassenfeld]], and [[Good Ventures]], the foundation Moskovitz and Tuna established in 2011. The two joined to form the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014, which began independent operations in 2017. Tuna is a former *[[The Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]]* reporter.[^3][^4] Good Ventures supplies nearly all of its grant money; as Coefficient Giving it began advising outside donors, and it directed more than 100 million dollars of other donors' money in 2024.[^2]
The split from GiveWell separated two functions: GiveWell kept recommending a short list of proven global-health charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale allowed. [[Alexander Berger]] rose to co-chief executive alongside Karnofsky and became sole chief executive when Karnofsky stepped back in 2023. Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence the organization acknowledged when, operating as Coefficient Giving, it began advising outside donors and directed more than 100 million dollars of non-Good-Ventures money in 2024.[^2][^5]
### AI Grantmaking
### Funding Priorities and the AI Turn
In March 2017 Open Philanthropy recommended 30 million dollars over three years to [[OpenAI]], under which Karnofsky joined OpenAI's board to oversee, "jointly with one other Board member," its safety and governance work. The grant page disclosed that the OpenAI researchers [[Dario Amodei]] and [[Paul Christiano]] were technical advisers to Open Philanthropy and lived in the same house as Karnofsky, who was engaged to Amodei's sister [[Daniela Amodei|Daniela]].[^5] In 2016 [[Sam Altman]] had led a 50-million-dollar investment in Asana, and [[Adam D'Angelo]] sat on the boards of both Asana and OpenAI.[^6] Moskovitz personally took part in the 124-million-dollar 2021 investment round of [[Anthropic]]. The Open Philanthropy program officer [[Luke Muehlhauser]] was one of Anthropic's four board members in 2023, and Karnofsky, Open Philanthropy's former chief executive and in 2023 its director of AI strategy, is married to Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei. Moskovitz told *[[Politico]]* that any returns from his Anthropic investment "will be entirely redirected back into our philanthropic work."[^6] In 2026 Berger said: "We're definitely not the Anthropic Foundation."[^1]
Open Philanthropy makes grants in two broad areas: global health and wellbeing, and longtermism, the latter encompassing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, and the far future. Its AI-risk funding flowed to the same research community around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] and the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] that the [[Rationalist Community]] built, making Open Philanthropy the principal institutional patron of AI-safety work outside the technology companies themselves. Karnofsky took a leave from his co-chief-executive role in 2023 and moved into a role focused on AI strategy. The organization renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.[^2][^4]
Muehlhauser was the grant investigator on the 55-million-dollar grant of January 2019 that launched the [[Center for Security and Emerging Technology]] at [[Georgetown University]] under the former IARPA director [[Jason Matheny]]; Open Philanthropy was CSET's "main funder" and raised its commitment to more than 100 million dollars through 2025.[^7] After Matheny became chief executive of the [[RAND Corporation]], Open Philanthropy gave RAND 5.5 million dollars in April 2023 and 10.5 million in October 2023 "to be spent at the discretion of RAND president and CEO Jason Matheny."[^8] It gave 5.16 million dollars to the [[Center for AI Safety]] in November 2022; the center organized the May 2023 statement that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority."[^6][^9] In November 2025 it gave 36 million dollars to [[Redwood Research]], which OpenAI brought in to analyze an AI-agent attack on [[Hugging Face]] in July 2026.[^1]
In 2017 Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to OpenAI that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, an early and unusual instance of a funder embedding itself inside an AI lab; it later became an early investor in Anthropic, where Karnofsky's wife Daniela Amodei is president. By June 2025 the organization had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative grants. The November 2025 rename to Coefficient Giving, under chief executive Alexander Berger, marked a shift toward running multi-donor funds so other philanthropists could pool money into its cause areas, with the name chosen to signal a "coefficient" that multiplies the impact of partner giving. Its concentration of AI-safety money has drawn criticism that a single foundation funds much of the field that scrutinizes the AI labs to which it is financially tied.[^2][^4][^5]
### Congress and the Press
In 2022 Open Philanthropy set aside nearly 3 million dollars for what became the first cohort of the [[Horizon Institute for Public Service]], which pays technology fellows placed in congressional offices, federal agencies and think tanks; the *Politico* reporter [[Brendan Bordelon]] wrote in October 2023 that Open Philanthropy had "effectively created" Horizon. A spokesperson, [[Mike Levine]], said Open Philanthropy "did not play an active role in screening, training, or placement of fellows" and that "the idea that we, our funders, or our grantees are motivated by pecuniary interests is misguided."[^6] By 2025 Coefficient Giving supplied the majority of the funding of the [[Tarbell Center for AI Journalism]], which places paid fellows in newsrooms and publishes the newsletter *Transformer*.[^10] In December 2025 *Semafor* reported that Open Philanthropy had been "bothered by media coverage of it, in particular a series of critical stories from Politico," and had hired political communications staff; its director of communications, [[Naina Bajekal]], was a former executive editor of *Time*, which had hosted four Tarbell fellows.[^11]
### Footnotes
[^1]: "How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy's EA-Inspired Programs," *Inside Philanthropy,* March 16, 2023. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2023-3-16-how-effective-is-effective-altruism-a-deep-dive-into-two-of-open-philanthropys-ea-inspired-programs
[^2]: "How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?" EA Forum. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4BJSXH9ho4eYNT73P/how-dependent-is-the-effective-altruism-movement-on-dustin
[^3]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review,* on Good Ventures, GiveWell, and the Open Philanthropy partnership. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
[^4]: "The Making of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei," Alex Kantrowitz, on Open Philanthropy as an early Anthropic funder and the Karnofsky tie. https://kantrowitz.medium.com/the-making-of-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-449777529dd6
[^5]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025, on the rename, Alexander Berger, the 4-billion-dollar grant total, and the multi-donor expansion; "OpenAI General Support," Good Ventures, on the March 2017 30-million-dollar grant and Karnofsky board seat. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
[^1]: Smith, Ben. "Coefficient Giving's CEO on Silicon Valley's $40 billion philanthropy boom." *Semafor,* September 3, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/09/03/2026/coefficient-givings-ceo-on-silicon-valley-40-billion-philanthropy-boom
[^2]: "Open Philanthropy Becomes Coefficient Giving, Expanding Work With Multiple Donors," Coefficient Giving, November 2025. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/press-release-open-philanthropy-becomes-coefficient-giving-expanding-work-with-multiple-donors/
[^3]: "How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy's EA-Inspired Programs," *Inside Philanthropy,* March 16, 2023. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2023-3-16-how-effective-is-effective-altruism-a-deep-dive-into-two-of-open-philanthropys-ea-inspired-programs
[^4]: "Giving in the Light of Reason," *Stanford Social Innovation Review.* https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason
[^5]: Open Philanthropy, "OpenAI, General Support," grant of March 2017, archived January 1, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250101012608/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/
[^6]: Bordelon, Brendan. "How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington." *Politico,* October 13, 2023. http://web.archive.org/web/20250902172514/https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362
[^7]: Open Philanthropy, "Georgetown University, Center for Security and Emerging Technology," grant of January 2019, archived January 2, 2025, http://web.archive.org/web/20250102035307/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/georgetown-university-center-for-security-and-emerging-technology/ ; Center for Security and Emerging Technology, "New Grant Agreement Boosts CSET Funding to More than $100 Million Through 2025," August 25, 2021. https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/new-grant-agreement-boosts-cset-funding-to-more-than-100-million-over-five-years/
[^8]: Open Philanthropy, "RAND Corporation, Emerging Technology Initiatives," gift of October 2023, with the related April 2023 gift, archived January 22, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250122041729/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/rand-corporation-emerging-technology-initiatives/
[^9]: Open Philanthropy, "Center for AI Safety, General Support (2022)," grant of November 2022, archived January 2, 2025. http://web.archive.org/web/20250102035329/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/center-for-ai-safety-general-support/
[^10]: Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, "Ethics and Standards policies," February 20, 2026. https://www.tarbellcenter.org/ethics-and-standards
[^11]: Tani, Max. "AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsrooms." *Semafor,* December 7, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2025/ai-critics-funded-ai-coverage-at-top-newsrooms

8
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/PayPal.md
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@ -42,19 +42,13 @@ relations:
start: 2000-05
end: 2000-09
fn: 1
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Max Levchin]]"
reverse: true
role: "chief technology officer"
start: 2000-03
fn: 1
- type: owned
with: "[[eBay]]"
reverse: true
start: 2002-10-03
fn: 4
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
PayPal, Inc. "resulted from a merger between Confinity, Inc., incorporated in December 1998, and X.com Corporation, incorporated in March 1999." [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Max Levchin]] co-founded Confinity; [[Elon Musk]], earlier a co-founder of Zip2, founded X.com, which "intended to provide Internet banking services." On March 30, 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, X.com surviving; by October 2000 the company had abandoned internet banking for the PayPal product, and it took the name PayPal, Inc. in February 2001. Musk was chief executive of X.com from March to December 1999 and of PayPal from May to September 2000, when Thiel, a former [[Sullivan & Cromwell]] lawyer and derivatives trader, replaced him; Levchin was chief technology officer. In September 2001 Musk was the largest shareholder, with 14.2 percent, ahead of entities affiliated with [[Sequoia Capital]] (10.7 percent), whose partner [[Michael Moritz]] sat on the board, and Nokia Ventures (9.6 percent); Thiel held 5.6 percent and [[Reid Hoffman]] under one percent.[^1]

22
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Rockefeller Brothers Fund.md
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@ -8,14 +8,8 @@ tags:
- Policy
summary: "Foundation established in 1940 by the five Rockefeller brothers whose Special Studies Project of 1956-61, directed by Henry Kissinger until 1958, produced the Rockefeller Panel Reports on security, economy and foreign policy."
created: 2026-06-05
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Henry A. Kissinger]]"
reverse: true
role: "director, Special Studies Project"
end: 1958-06-30
fn: 5
---
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) was established in 1940 by the five sons of [[John D. Rockefeller Jr.]] as a vehicle for coordinating the brothers' charitable giving, and became in the 1950s the primary instrument through which [[Nelson Rockefeller]] channeled Cold War policy development. Its Special Studies Project (1956-1961), convened by Nelson and staffed by figures from the national security establishment, produced six classified panel reports shaping Eisenhower and Kennedy administration defense and foreign policy. Panel IV on national security, chaired by [[Henry Kissinger]], launched Kissinger's career as a foreign policy adviser and cemented his relationship with Nelson Rockefeller.
@ -34,9 +28,9 @@ The panels produced a series of influential reports between 1958 and 1961, colle
### Panel II: International Security (Kissinger)
[[Henry A. Kissinger|Henry Kissinger]] of Harvard's Center for International Affairs was director of the Special Studies Project until his resignation on June 30, 1958, and thereafter a consultant; the report of Panel II, *International Security: The Military Aspect,* was prepared under his direction. Panel IV dealt with the American economy.[^5] The panel's work on nuclear strategy and limited war doctrine reflected the [[Rockefeller family]]'s long-standing interest in "flexible response" military capabilities as an alternative to massive nuclear retaliation.
[[Henry A. Kissinger|Henry Kissinger]] of Harvard's Center for International Affairs was director of the Special Studies Project until his resignation on June 30, 1958, and thereafter a consultant; the report of Panel II, *International Security: The Military Aspect,* was prepared under his direction. Panel IV dealt with the American economy.[^3] The panel's work on nuclear strategy and limited war doctrine reflected the [[Rockefeller family]]'s long-standing interest in "flexible response" military capabilities as an alternative to massive nuclear retaliation.
Kissinger's panel work through the RBF gave him the intellectual platform and Rockefeller family connections that launched his career as a foreign policy adviser. After the Special Studies Project, Kissinger continued to serve as Nelson Rockefeller's foreign policy consultant through the 1960s.[^3]
Kissinger's panel work through the RBF gave him the intellectual platform and Rockefeller family connections that launched his career as a foreign policy adviser. After the Special Studies Project, Kissinger continued to serve as Nelson Rockefeller's foreign policy consultant through the 1960s.[^4]
### Other Notable Panelists
@ -44,10 +38,12 @@ The Special Studies Project brought together a cross-section of the Cold War est
### Bomb Shelters and Civil Defense
Nelson Rockefeller used the RBF's national security framework to promote bomb shelter programs aggressively in New York State. His commitment to civil defense infrastructure, which [[John F. Kennedy]] found politically inconvenient, was an expression of the RBF's panel work on the survivability of nuclear conflict. This policy position created a public profile that Kennedy's advisers viewed as a challenge to Kennedy's own national security credibility.[^4]
Nelson Rockefeller used the RBF's national security framework to promote bomb shelter programs aggressively in New York State. His commitment to civil defense infrastructure, which [[John F. Kennedy]] found politically inconvenient, was an expression of the RBF's panel work on the survivability of nuclear conflict. This policy position created a public profile that Kennedy's advisers viewed as a challenge to Kennedy's own national security credibility.[^5]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon*. HarperCollins, 1995. Ch. 25, Appendix A.
[^2]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 25, 27.
[^3]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 25, 27.
[^4]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 25.
[^5]: Rockefeller Brothers Fund. *Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.* Doubleday, 1961, list of project staff and introduction to the report of Panel II. https://archive.org/details/prospect-for-america-the-rockefeller-panel-reports-rockefeller-brothers-fund-1961
[^3]: Rockefeller Brothers Fund. *Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports.* Doubleday, 1961, list of project staff and introduction to the report of Panel II. https://archive.org/details/prospect-for-america-the-rockefeller-panel-reports-rockefeller-brothers-fund-1961
[^4]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 25, 27.
[^5]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 25.

58
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.md Normal file
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@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
---
category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
aliases:
- "Tarbell Fellowship"
- "Tarbell Center"
- "Tarbell"
tags:
- Organization
- Journalism
- Media
- OpenPhilanthropy
- EffectiveAltruism
- ArtificialIntelligence
summary: "Nonprofit launched in 2022 that pays early-career journalists placed in newsrooms to cover AI and publishes the newsletter Transformer; most of its funding comes from Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy."
start: 2022
relations:
- type: funded
with: "[[Open Philanthropy]]"
reverse: true
role: "majority funder as Coefficient Giving, as of 2025"
fn: 2
- type: funded
with: "[[Future of Life Institute]]"
reverse: true
fn: 1
- type: head_of
with: "[[Cillian Crosson]]"
reverse: true
role: "executive director"
fn: 1
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
---
The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism was launched in 2022 and funds work by early-career technology journalists, in its words to help society "navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI."[^1] Its ethics policy of 2026 covers "all Tarbell staff, fellows, and grantees, including our in-house publication [[Transformer]]," and states: "As of 2025, the majority of our funding originates with a single funder, [[Coefficient Giving]] (formerly known as Open Philanthropy)." Donors, it says, "have no role in reviewing, vetting, or approving our staff, fellows, or grantees," and fellows must disclose their Tarbell association on their author pages. Tarbell staff may not own individual shares of companies that develop or deploy advanced AI.[^2]
### Placements
In December 2025 the *[[Semafor]]* media reporter [[Max Tani]] wrote that *[[Time]]* had had four Tarbell fellows on staff, that fellows had worked at [[Bloomberg]], *[[The Verge]]*, the *[[Los Angeles Times]]* and *[[The Information]]*, and that *Semafor* itself had briefly had a fellow before ending the arrangement "after several weeks without publishing any of their work." Coefficient Giving's director of communications, [[Naina Bajekal]], was a former executive editor of *Time*.[^1]
### The NBC Disclosure
In late 2025 [[NBC News]] reported that [[OpenAI]] had issued legal threats against nonprofits that had criticized it. According to *Semafor*, OpenAI privately complained to NBC that the author had been paid by Tarbell and that Tarbell was funded in part by the [[Future of Life Institute]], one of the groups in the story; NBC appended a disclosure. OpenAI declined to comment to *Semafor*. Tarbell's executive director, [[Cillian Crosson]], said: "It's telling that OpenAI is attempting to discredit independent reporting instead of addressing the factual findings of that reporting." Bajekal said Coefficient Giving had "no involvement in coverage decisions." Tani also noted a critical piece on the fellowship in the *[[Washington Examiner]]*.[^1]
### Transformer and Brian Chau
On May 23, 2024, *Transformer*, edited by [[Shakeel Hashim]], published an article stating that [[Brian Chau]], founder of the AI think tank [[Alliance for the Future]], "has a history of expressing racist and sexist remarks," quoting his posts about [[George Floyd]] and about Harvard's president, and his praise of the podcast guests [[Curtis Yarvin]] and [[Richard Hanania]]. Chau did not respond to the article's request for comment. Alliance for the Future was then campaigning against California's AI bill [[SB 1047]].[^3]
On September 2, 2026, *Effort*, a publication founded by Chau, published an unsigned investigation titled "How [[Effective Altruism]] Bought the Media." It stated that all six participants in a *Guardian* article on the forecast "[[AI 2027]]," including the journalist and the publisher, were paid by three donors: Coefficient Giving, [[Jaan Tallinn]]'s [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]] and [[Effective Ventures]]. It wrote that Coefficient paid the journalist's salary through the Tarbell Fellowship and had given the *Guardian* more than 3 million dollars, that "Coefficient pays the salaries of two dozen journalists at major news outlets," and that "58/100" of the *Time 100* profiles were written by Tarbell-paid journalists. It also tabulated grants from Open Philanthropy, [[EA Funds]], the Future of Life Institute, the [[Long-Term Future Fund]] and the [[Center for AI Safety]] to YouTube channels, among them [[Rational Animations]] and [[Robert Miles AI Safety]].[^4][^5] Chau promoted it the same day on X: "BREAKING: AI Doomers Are Buying Potemkin Articles."[^6]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Tani, Max. "AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsrooms." *Semafor,* December 7, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2025/ai-critics-funded-ai-coverage-at-top-newsrooms
[^2]: Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, "Ethics and Standards policies," February 20, 2026. https://www.tarbellcenter.org/ethics-and-standards
[^3]: Hashim, Shakeel. "Alliance for the Future director Brian Chau has history of racist, sexist remarks." *Transformer,* May 23, 2024. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/alliance-for-the-future-director
[^4]: Effort Investigations Desk. "How Effective Altruism Bought the Media." *Effort,* September 2, 2026. https://www.effort.news/tarbell
[^5]: Effort News, "About." https://www.effort.news/about
[^6]: Chau, Brian (@brianchau57). Post on X, September 2, 2026. https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2095128785955987698

24
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Church of New Revelation.md
View file

@ -13,29 +13,19 @@ summary: "Tax-exempt church incorporated in Delaware in 1974 with a Kearny, New
location: "Kearny, New Jersey"
start: 1974
relations:
- type: head_of
with: "[[Adam Starchild]]"
reverse: true
role: "president"
fn: 2
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Dyer Grossman]]"
reverse: true
role: "youth director"
fn: 2
created: 2026-04-28
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
The Church of the New Revelation was incorporated in Delaware in 1974, listing its principal place of business in [[New Jersey]]; its articles of incorporation stated that it was formed to train and indoctrinate ministers, brothers and sisters in its teachings and ordain them to carry out its work. [[Adam Starchild]], listed in the Kearny telephone book, was its president and [[Dyer Grossman]] its youth director. The Internal Revenue Service declared it exempt from taxes without challenging or investigating its claim to be a charitable organization. [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]], the camp on [[North Fox Island]] organized by [[Gerald Richards]], was created and operated under its auspices; Richards named the church, the [[Ocean Living Institute]] and the Educational Foundation for Youth as fronts for the production of child pornography. A letter from Grossman found on Richards recommended setting up "child care" sites under the church or the foundation because of their tax exemptions.[^2]
The Church of the New Revelation was incorporated in Delaware in 1974, listing its principal place of business in [[New Jersey]]; its articles of incorporation stated that it was formed to train and indoctrinate ministers, brothers and sisters in its teachings and ordain them to carry out its work. [[Adam Starchild]], listed in the Kearny telephone book, was its president and [[Dyer Grossman]] its youth director. The Internal Revenue Service declared it exempt from taxes without challenging or investigating its claim to be a charitable organization. [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]], the camp on [[North Fox Island]] organized by [[Gerald Richards]], was created and operated under its auspices; Richards named the church, the [[Ocean Living Institute]] and the Educational Foundation for Youth as fronts for the production of child pornography. A letter from Grossman found on Richards recommended setting up "child care" sites under the church or the foundation because of their tax exemptions.[^1]
"There is no church," said Pete Bouldin of the Tennessee district attorney general's office. "It's just a referral agency which distributes pornography around the country."[^3]
"There is no church," said Pete Bouldin of the Tennessee district attorney general's office. "It's just a referral agency which distributes pornography around the country."[^2]
### Father Bud's Boys Farm
The writer S. Dovey wrote that [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee was incorporated under the church and that Grossman created the church on paper; [[Francis Shelden]] and Starchild were connected to it through the incorporation of the North Fox Island mission.[^1]
The writer S. Dovey wrote that [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee was incorporated under the church and that Grossman created the church on paper; [[Francis Shelden]] and Starchild were connected to it through the incorporation of the North Fox Island mission.[^3]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It gives New Jersey as the state of incorporation. The contemporaneous reporting lists Boys Farm, Inc., of Alto, Tennessee, as a separate organization and names Starchild, not Grossman, as the church's president.
[^2]: Wright, Marilyn. "Porno Ring Uses Church, Tax Laws." *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 86-87. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^3]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^1]: Wright, Marilyn. "Porno Ring Uses Church, Tax Laws." *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 86-87. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^2]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^3]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It gives New Jersey as the state of incorporation. The contemporaneous reporting lists Boys Farm, Inc., of Alto, Tennessee, as a separate organization and names Starchild, not Grossman, as the church's president.

82
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/The Zizians.md
View file

@ -9,10 +9,10 @@ tags:
- ArtificialIntelligence
- Veganism
- Transhumanism
summary: "The Zizians are a small group led by the computer programmer Jack LaSota that splintered from the Bay Area rationalist movement around an idiosyncratic theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, and AI-apocalypse decision theory, and that has been tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent that produced a federal death-penalty prosecution."
summary: "Small group around Jack LaSota that split from the Bay Area rationalist movement, tied to six deaths in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including a Border Patrol agent's."
location: "Vallejo, California; San Francisco Bay Area"
created: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-06-19
updated: 2026-09-22
---
The Zizians are a small ideological group that formed around the computer programmer [[Jack LaSota]], who wrote under the persona "Ziz," as a splinter of the Bay Area [[Rationalist Community]] in the late 2010s. The group fused a borrowed rationalist decision theory with an original theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, anarchism, and transhumanism, and several of its members acted on the doctrine with lethal violence. Between 2022 and 2025 the group was tied to six deaths across [[California]], [[Pennsylvania]], and [[Vermont]], including the January 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]], which produced the first federal death-penalty prosecution brought under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. The members were recruited almost entirely from the rationalist and [[Effective Altruism]] milieu around the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]] (MIRI) and the [[Center for Applied Rationality]] (CFAR), most of them young, highly educated, transgender, and preoccupied with the danger of artificial intelligence.[^1][^2][^3]
@ -21,61 +21,63 @@ The Zizians are a small ideological group that formed around the computer progra
LaSota, born and raised in [[Fairbanks]], [[Alaska]], studied computer science at the [[University of Alaska Fairbanks]], briefly pursued postgraduate work at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]], and interned at [[NASA]] before relocating to the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] around 2013 to involve herself with MIRI and CFAR. She had been an avid reader of [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s writing and entered the community as an acolyte before turning into one of its sharpest critics, accusing MIRI and CFAR of "ethical hypocrisy" and of failing to live up to the moral demands of their own rationalist doctrine. By the mid-2010s she had begun publishing dense blog posts that extended rationalist decision theory into claims about gender, cognition, and morality.[^1][^2][^4]
LaSota began blogging under the persona "Ziz" around 2016, debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on [[LessWrong]] before moving to her own site with longer posts on technology, gender identity, and cognition. CFAR co-founder [[Anna Salamon]] later characterized LaSota as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a Bay Area scene crowded with technical talent, and described the circle's turn toward extremity as an attempt to become "main characters" by other means. The formal split came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected the hemisphere theory and LaSota broke with the community that had drawn her west.[^2][^17][^18]
LaSota began blogging under the persona "Ziz" around 2016, debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on [[LessWrong]] before moving to her own site with longer posts on technology, gender identity, and cognition. CFAR co-founder [[Anna Salamon]] later characterized LaSota as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a Bay Area scene crowded with technical talent, and described the circle's turn toward extremity as an attempt to become "main characters" by other means. The formal split came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected the hemisphere theory and LaSota broke with the community that had drawn her west.[^2][^5][^6]
### The Rationalist Fleet
By 2017 LaSota had gathered a small circle of followers, largely transgender and gender-nonconforming rationalists, to establish what they called the "Rationalist Fleet," a floating intentional community organized around anarchic self-sufficiency, cognitive liberation, and total veganism. The group acquired a repurposed World War II tugboat, the Caleb (formerly the Panameta), and sailed it from Alaska to California. When the vessel's upkeep collapsed, members moved into trailers and converted box trucks along the California coast, the living arrangement that later brought them to the [[Vallejo]] property of [[Curtis Lind]].[^2][^5]
By 2017 LaSota had gathered a small circle of followers, largely transgender and gender-nonconforming rationalists, to establish what they called the "Rationalist Fleet," a floating intentional community organized around anarchic self-sufficiency, cognitive liberation, and total veganism. The group acquired a repurposed [[World War II]] tugboat, the Caleb (formerly the Panameta), and sailed it from Alaska to California. When the vessel's upkeep collapsed, members moved into trailers and converted box trucks along the California coast, the living arrangement that later brought them to the [[Vallejo]] property of [[Curtis Lind]].[^2][^7]
The fleet was conceived as a way to live outside the conventional economy while devoting full attention to averting an AI catastrophe, and members pooled funds to keep the boats running. The scheme placed a cluster of people with no maritime experience aboard aging vessels that demanded constant maintenance, and the financial and physical strain pushed the group ashore within a few years. The truck-and-trailer encampments that followed kept the community mobile and off conventional leases, a pattern that recurred through the Vallejo lot in 2022 and the box trucks parked near [[Frostburg]], Maryland, where members were arrested in 2025.[^2][^5]
The fleet was conceived as a way to live outside the conventional economy while devoting full attention to averting an AI catastrophe, and members pooled funds to keep the boats running. The scheme placed a cluster of people with no maritime experience aboard aging vessels that demanded constant maintenance, and the financial and physical strain pushed the group ashore within a few years. The truck-and-trailer encampments that followed kept the community mobile and off conventional leases, a pattern that recurred through the Vallejo lot in 2022 and the box trucks parked near [[Frostburg]], Maryland, where members were arrested in 2025.[^2][^7]
### Ideology
LaSota's central theory held that the brain's two hemispheres house separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, a "domineering, analytic" masculine left and an "empathetic, intuitive" feminine right, and that each hemisphere could be independently good or evil. She sorted people's mental "cores" into categories of "nongood," "single good," and "double good" according to how completely they aligned with her moral system. She counted very few people, herself among them, as "double good"; the associate [[Gwen Danielson]] was rated only "single good," which in the group's terms meant she could not be fully trusted and had to be watched.[^1][^6]
LaSota's central theory held that the brain's two hemispheres house separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, a "domineering, analytic" masculine left and an "empathetic, intuitive" feminine right, and that each hemisphere could be independently good or evil. She sorted people's mental "cores" into categories of "nongood," "single good," and "double good" according to how completely they aligned with her moral system. She counted very few people, herself among them, as "double good"; the associate [[Gwen Danielson]] was rated only "single good," which in the group's terms meant she could not be fully trusted and had to be watched.[^1][^8]
The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," an attempt to rest one brain hemisphere while keeping the other awake, which LaSota described as a way to "jailbreak" the mind and deepen a member's commitment to the cause. Members also practiced "debucketing," the deliberate unlearning of inherited social categories in order to reach what LaSota framed as unmediated moral insight. The moral framework took the concept of "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction and combined it with the timeless-decision-theory argument that one should act on universal principles rather than causal pragmatism, so that ordinary ethical compromises became, in the group's account, existential betrayals. LaSota wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in the [[Star Wars]] films, framing a self-consciously adversarial morality against a world the group held to be irredeemably complicit in animal killing and on the verge of collapse through artificial-intelligence misalignment.[^1][^2][^6]
The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," an attempt to rest one brain hemisphere while keeping the other awake, which LaSota described as a way to "jailbreak" the mind and deepen a member's commitment to the cause. Members also practiced "debucketing," the deliberate unlearning of inherited social categories in order to reach what LaSota framed as unmediated moral insight. The moral framework took the concept of "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction and combined it with the timeless-decision-theory argument that one should act on universal principles rather than causal pragmatism, so that ordinary ethical compromises became, in the group's account, existential betrayals. LaSota wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in the [[Star Wars]] films, framing a self-consciously adversarial morality against a world the group held to be irredeemably complicit in animal killing and on the verge of collapse through artificial-intelligence misalignment.[^1][^2][^8]
In February 2018 a follower, [[Maia Pasek]], who used the name "Squirrel," died by suicide after intense involvement with LaSota and the group's psychological practices. Outside observers attributed the death to the sleep-deprivation experiments; LaSota instead presented it as evidence of the transformative power of the method.[^2]
LaSota's account folded the death into the hemisphere doctrine, holding that Pasek's two hemispheres had reached opposing moral verdicts and that one had killed the other, a framing that recast a suicide as a logical outcome of the practice rather than a casualty of it. The group treated the experiments as a kind of moral and cognitive boot camp, and the willingness to read a member's death as confirmation rather than refutation became a feature of how the circle processed later violence and casualties among its own.[^2][^6]
LaSota's account folded the death into the hemisphere doctrine, holding that Pasek's two hemispheres had reached opposing moral verdicts and that one had killed the other, a framing that recast a suicide as a logical outcome of the practice rather than a casualty of it. The group treated the experiments as a kind of moral and cognitive boot camp, and the willingness to read a member's death as confirmation rather than refutation became a feature of how the circle processed later violence and casualties among its own.[^2][^8]
### The 2019 CFAR Break and the Name
In November 2019 LaSota, [[Emma Borhanian]], [[Alexander Leatham]] (who used the name "Somni"), and Danielson, among others, appeared in [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes masks]] and black robes to protest a CFAR alumni retreat at [[Occidental]] in [[Sonoma County]], blocking the entrances and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four people were arrested. CFAR had already barred LaSota and Danielson from its events that year, and the wider rationalist movement publicly distanced itself from the circle. The label "Zizians" was coined by online commentators warning the rationalist scene about LaSota; the group never adopted the name itself. One participant in the standoff was still being sentenced for it as late as April 2026.[^1][^3][^7]
In November 2019 LaSota, [[Emma Borhanian]], [[Alexander Leatham]] (who used the name "Somni"), and Danielson, among others, appeared in [[Guy Fawkes mask|Guy Fawkes masks]] and black robes to protest a CFAR alumni retreat at [[Occidental]] in [[Sonoma County]], blocking the entrances and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four people were arrested. CFAR had already barred LaSota and Danielson from its events that year, and the wider rationalist movement publicly distanced itself from the circle. The label "Zizians" was coined by online commentators warning the rationalist scene about LaSota; the group never adopted the name itself. One participant in the standoff was still being sentenced for it as late as April 2026.[^1][^3][^9]
The protest framed CFAR as having concealed sexual misconduct within rationalist organizations, the same grievance of institutional hypocrisy that had driven LaSota's earlier break, now escalated into a masked physical blockade. The arrests gave the group its first criminal exposure and tied several of the people later central to the killings, Borhanian, Leatham, and Danielson, into a single documented incident years before the violence. The slow pace of the prosecution, with a defendant still facing sentencing in 2026 for conduct in 2019, kept the standoff procedurally alive across the entire arc of the later cases.[^1][^7]
The protest framed CFAR as having concealed sexual misconduct within rationalist organizations, the same grievance of institutional hypocrisy that had driven LaSota's earlier break, now escalated into a masked physical blockade. The arrests gave the group its first criminal exposure and tied several of the people later central to the killings, Borhanian, Leatham, and Danielson, into a single documented incident years before the violence. The slow pace of the prosecution, with a defendant still facing sentencing in 2026 for conduct in 2019, kept the standoff procedurally alive across the entire arc of the later cases.[^1][^9]
### The Faked Deaths
Disappearance and feigned death recur in the group's history. Danielson stopped appearing for court hearings in April 2019, and a lawyer later suggested she might be dead. In August 2022 LaSota staged her own death, leaving the impression that she had drowned after going off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in [[Philadelphia]] in 2023. She was wanted in two states by the time she was arrested in 2025.[^5][^8]
Disappearance and feigned death recur in the group's history. Danielson stopped appearing for court hearings in April 2019, and a lawyer later suggested she might be dead. In August 2022 LaSota staged her own death, leaving the impression that she had drowned after going off a boat in the [[San Francisco]] Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in [[Philadelphia]] in 2023. She was wanted in two states by the time she was arrested in 2025.[^7][^10]
The 2022 disappearance followed a specific script: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was recovered, and an obituary was published, leaving an official record of a drowning that let her drop out of pending Vallejo proceedings. The recruitment pattern that fed the group depended on similar severances on the members' side. Several younger recruits cut contact with their families before joining, sending final messages and changing phone numbers, so that the group absorbed people who had already vanished from their previous lives, a dynamic that surfaced again in the 2024 disappearance of [[Teresa Youngblut]].[^3][^8]
The 2022 disappearance followed a specific script: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was recovered, and an obituary was published, leaving an official record of a drowning that let her drop out of pending Vallejo proceedings. The recruitment pattern that fed the group depended on similar severances on the members' side. Several younger recruits cut contact with their families before joining, sending final messages and changing phone numbers, so that the group absorbed people who had already vanished from their previous lives, a dynamic that surfaced again in the 2024 disappearance of [[Teresa Youngblut]].[^3][^10]
### The Vallejo Killings
By autumn 2022 LaSota and several followers were living in vehicles on a Vallejo lot owned by Curtis Lind, an octogenarian landlord who rented them space. On November 15, 2022, a dispute over unpaid rent escalated when members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him an eye; Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed Emma Borhanian, a longtime LaSota collaborator. Leatham and [[Suri Dao]] were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind; Leatham later attempted to escape custody twice.[^2][^9]
By autumn 2022 LaSota and several followers were living in vehicles on a Vallejo lot owned by Curtis Lind, an octogenarian landlord who rented them space. On November 15, 2022, a dispute over unpaid rent escalated when members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him an eye; Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed Emma Borhanian, a longtime LaSota collaborator. Leatham and [[Suri Dao]] were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind; Leatham later attempted to escape custody twice.[^2][^11]
On January 17, 2025, Lind was killed near the site of the 2022 attack, stabbed with his throat cut, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. [[Maximilian Snyder]], a former [[University of Oxford]] student connected to the group, was charged by [[Solano County]] prosecutors with Lind's murder, which prosecutors alleged was meant to prevent his testimony.[^9][^10]
On January 17, 2025, Lind was killed near the site of the 2022 attack, stabbed with his throat cut, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. [[Maximilian Snyder]], a former [[University of Oxford]] student connected to the group, was charged by [[Solano County]] prosecutors with Lind's murder, which prosecutors alleged was meant to prevent his testimony.[^11][^12]
### The Pennsylvania Killings
On December 31, 2022, [[Richard Zajko]] and [[Rita Zajko]] were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of [[Michelle Zajko]], a member of the group; Michelle was questioned and treated as a person of interest but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Investigators have linked a firearm tied to Michelle Zajko to subsequent incidents involving the group.[^3][^11]
On December 31, 2022, [[Richard Zajko]] and [[Rita Zajko]] were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of [[Michelle Zajko]], a member of the group; Michelle, long a person of interest, was charged with first-degree murder by the Delaware County district attorney, Tanner Rouse, on June 24, 2026; he said she likely did not act alone. She has denied killing them.[^13] Investigators have linked a firearm tied to Michelle Zajko to subsequent incidents involving the group.[^3][^14]
The couple, ages 72 and 69, were not found until a January 2, 2023 welfare check; Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, and two 9mm shell casings were left at the scene with no weapon recovered. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania investigators determined that ammunition matching the scene had been purchased by Michelle Zajko, who acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and in early 2023 LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. The case remained unsolved into 2026, with the WHYY and AP timelines noting that no one had been charged in the deaths themselves.[^11][^16][^19]
The couple, ages 72 and 69, were not found until a January 2, 2023 welfare check; Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, and two 9mm shell casings were left at the scene with no weapon recovered. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania investigators determined that ammunition matching the scene had been purchased by Michelle Zajko, who acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and in early 2023 LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. The case remained unsolved into 2026, with the WHYY and AP timelines noting that no one had been charged in the deaths themselves.[^14][^15][^16]
### The Vermont Killing
On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, near the Canadian border, carrying Teresa Youngblut and [[Felix Bauckholt]], a German national and quantitative trader who used the name "Ophelia." A shootout followed in which Agent David Maland was killed and Bauckholt was shot dead; Youngblut was wounded. Federal prosecutors allege Youngblut fired the shot that killed Maland. The killing drew national attention to the group and set off the arrests that followed.[^3][^12]
On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle on [[Interstate 91]] in [[Coventry, Vermont]], near the Canadian border, carrying Teresa Youngblut and [[Felix Bauckholt]], a German national and quantitative trader who used the name "Ophelia." A shootout followed in which Agent David Maland was killed and Bauckholt was shot dead; Youngblut was wounded. Federal prosecutors allege Youngblut fired the shot that killed Maland. The killing drew national attention to the group and set off the arrests that followed.[^3][^17]
The pair had drawn law enforcement attention days earlier: a hotel employee in Lyndonville reported that they had checked in around January 14 wearing all-black tactical clothing and protective gear, including a holstered firearm, which prompted periodic surveillance, and investigators observed them in tactical dress in downtown Newport on January 19. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut got out of the vehicle during the stop and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before being shot. A search of the vehicle turned up multiple firearms, .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, handheld radios, and roughly a dozen electronic devices, several wrapped in aluminum foil. Maland died at North Country Hospital and Youngblut was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock.[^12][^20]
The pair had drawn law enforcement attention days earlier: a hotel employee in Lyndonville reported that they had checked in around January 14 wearing all-black tactical clothing and protective gear, including a holstered firearm, which prompted periodic surveillance, and investigators observed them in tactical dress in downtown Newport on January 19. According to the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] affidavit, Youngblut got out of the vehicle during the stop and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before being shot. A search of the vehicle turned up multiple firearms, .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, handheld radios, and roughly a dozen electronic devices, several wrapped in aluminum foil. Maland died at North Country Hospital and Youngblut was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock.[^17][^18]
### Arrests and Prosecutions
On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Michelle Zajko and [[Daniel Blank]] in Allegany County, [[Maryland]], after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators found LaSota in possession of a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the three were ordered held without bail. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted LaSota on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years.[^13][^21]
On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Michelle Zajko and [[Daniel Blank]] in [[Allegany County]], [[Maryland]], after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators found LaSota in possession of a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the three were ordered held without bail. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted LaSota on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years.[^19][^20]
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation for LaSota after defense attorney Gary Proctor reported that she had refused to speak with a doctor brought to the jail and had told a prior hearing that the judge led an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." LaSota's lawyers separately rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in court filings and accused the Department of Justice of misgendering their client by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center pending the evaluation.[^14][^22]
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation for LaSota after defense attorney Gary Proctor reported that she had refused to speak with a doctor brought to the jail and had told a prior hearing that the judge led an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." LaSota's lawyers separately rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in court filings and accused the [[Department of Justice]] of misgendering their client by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center pending the evaluation.[^21][^22]
Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in August 2025 added the murder of Maland and the assault of two other agents, and the Department of Justice filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, the first such pursuit of the second Trump administration. She pleaded not guilty in September 2025, and proceedings continued into 2026. Snyder was charged by Solano County with Lind's murder, and Leatham and Dao with the 2022 killing of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. By early 2026 at least seven people associated with the group were fighting charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The six deaths attributed to the group are Borhanian and Lind in California, Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania, and Maland and Bauckholt in Vermont.[^3][^15][^16]
Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in August 2025 added the murder of Maland and the assault of two other agents, and the Department of Justice filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, the first such pursuit of the second Trump administration. She pleaded not guilty in September 2025, and proceedings continued into 2026. Snyder was charged by Solano County with Lind's murder, and Leatham and Dao with the 2022 killing of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. By early 2026 at least seven people associated with the group were fighting charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The six deaths attributed to the group are Borhanian and Lind in California, Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania, and Maland and Bauckholt in Vermont.[^3][^15][^23]
In September 2025 Leatham, in court in Solano County, read a statement saying, "I am an innocent woman! I have done nothing wrong! This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people!" and filed a motion to replace her lawyer; the Leatham and Dao trial was then set for October 21.[^24] In Vermont, Youngblut's lawyers sought in August 2026 an order preserving the phones of every officer and agent involved in the surveillance and stop, and argued that the authorities had determined before the stop that Bauckholt held a valid visa, undercutting its stated immigration basis; Assistant U.S. Attorney [[Matthew Lasher]] called the request "impractical, invasive, and unsupported by law" and wrote that the defense's source "indicated only" that a visa had been issued. No trial date had been set.[^25] In February 2026 Blank was allowed to post an unsecured bond of 15,000 dollars, and he was released from custody in August 2026; LaSota and Zajko were held in Allegany County pending extradition.[^26]
### Footnotes
@ -83,21 +85,25 @@ Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in A
[^2]: "Zizians," World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, November 7, 2025; scholarly profile of the group's origins, the Rationalist Fleet, ideology, and timeline. https://wrldrels.org/2025/11/07/zizians/
[^3]: "A timeline of activities of a cultlike group tied to the killing of a Border Patrol agent," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
[^4]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/
[^5]: "'Zizian' namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states," *Open Vallejo,* January 31, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/
[^6]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025, on the hemisphere theory, the "single good" and "double good" classifications, and the group's composition. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309
[^7]: "Woman sentenced for 2019 Sonoma County standoff involving cultlike Zizians group linked to killings," *The Press Democrat,* April 23, 2026. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/04/23/sonoma-county-woman-sentenced-for-2019-standoff-zizians/
[^8]: "Key figure in 'Zizian' group tied to Vermont border patrol shooting faked death in 2022 and is wanted in 2 states," *VTDigger,* February 2, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/02/02/key-figure-in-zizian-group-tied-to-vermont-border-patrol-shooting-faked-death-in-2022-and-is-wanted-in-2-states/
[^9]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
[^10]: "Federal grand jury indicts Zizian namesake with Vallejo ties," *Open Vallejo,* June 20, 2025, on the Snyder charge and the Lind killing. https://openvallejo.org/2025/06/20/federal-grand-jury-indicts-zizian-namesake-with-vallejo-ties/
[^11]: "Michelle Zajko case: Member of cultlike Zizian group says she did not kill her parents in Delaware County," 6abc Philadelphia, 2025. https://6abc.com/post/michelle-zajko-case-member-zizian-group-says-she-did-not-kill-parents-delaware-county/16181890/
[^12]: "Prosecutors file notice they will seek the death penalty against Teresa Youngblut in border agent killing," *VTDigger,* August 14, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/08/14/grand-jury-returns-new-indictment-against-teresa-youngblut-for-allegedly-killing-border-agent/
[^13]: U.S. Department of Justice, District of Maryland, "Alaskan Individual Charged with Possessing Firearms and Ammunition as a Fugitive from Justice," June 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/alaskan-individual-charged-possessing-firearms-and-ammunition-fugitive-justice
[^14]: "Judge orders competency evaluation for alleged 'Zizian' cult leader Ziz LaSota," *The Baltimore Banner,* November 2025. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizian-cult-leader-competency-evaluation-PXYELJW3NBB5HOUWG6MA4U4E3I/
[^15]: "Prosecutors seek death penalty against Zizians member charged with murdering Vermont border agent," Associated Press, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-seek-death-penalty-fatal-shooting-border-patrol-agent/
[^16]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/
[^17]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the 2016 start of the "Ziz" blog and the 2018 split from the rationalist movement. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
[^18]: "Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley," Ian Leslie, 2025, on Anna Salamon's account of LaSota wanting to "feel special" and the group's pursuit of being "main characters." https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley
[^19]: "Member of Zizians, cultlike group of AI-obsessed vegans, says she didn't kill her parents," *NBC News,* 2025, on the gunshot wounds, 9mm casings, and ammunition purchase. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/member-zizians-cultlike-group-ai-obsessed-vegans-says-didnt-kill-paren-rcna201537
[^20]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville hotel, the surveillance, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/
[^21]: "Federal authorities bring firearms charge against alleged leader of Zizians," *VTDigger,* June 20, 2025, on the Frostburg arrest and the federal indictment. https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/20/federal-authorities-bring-firearms-charge-against-alleged-leader-of-zizians/
[^5]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025, on the 2016 start of the "Ziz" blog and the 2018 split from the rationalist movement. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
[^6]: "Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley," Ian Leslie, 2025, on Anna Salamon's account of LaSota wanting to "feel special" and the group's pursuit of being "main characters." https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/rationalist-cults-of-silicon-valley
[^7]: "'Zizian' namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states," *Open Vallejo,* January 31, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/
[^8]: "How did a German math genius get drawn into a 'cult' accused in coast-to-coast killings?" *NBC News,* 2025, on the hemisphere theory, the "single good" and "double good" classifications, and the group's composition. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-drawn-cult-accused-coast-coast-killings-rcna189309
[^9]: "Woman sentenced for 2019 Sonoma County standoff involving cultlike Zizians group linked to killings," *The Press Democrat,* April 23, 2026. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/04/23/sonoma-county-woman-sentenced-for-2019-standoff-zizians/
[^10]: "Key figure in 'Zizian' group tied to Vermont border patrol shooting faked death in 2022 and is wanted in 2 states," *VTDigger,* February 2, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/02/02/key-figure-in-zizian-group-tied-to-vermont-border-patrol-shooting-faked-death-in-2022-and-is-wanted-in-2-states/
[^11]: "How a Vermont border agent's death exposed violence linked to the cultlike Zizian group," *CBS News,* 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-exposed-violence-linked-cultlike-zizian-group/
[^12]: "Federal grand jury indicts Zizian namesake with Vallejo ties," *Open Vallejo,* June 20, 2025, on the Snyder charge and the Lind killing. https://openvallejo.org/2025/06/20/federal-grand-jury-indicts-zizian-namesake-with-vallejo-ties/
[^13]: Vella, Vinny. "A former Delco woman tied to the Zizians extremist group has been charged with her parents' killing." *The Philadelphia Inquirer,* June 24, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/crime/michelle-zajko-zizians-group-parents-murder-charges-chester-heights-20260624.html
[^14]: "Michelle Zajko case: Member of cultlike Zizian group says she did not kill her parents in Delaware County," 6abc Philadelphia, 2025. https://6abc.com/post/michelle-zajko-case-member-zizian-group-says-she-did-not-kill-parents-delaware-county/16181890/
[^15]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/
[^16]: "Member of Zizians, cultlike group of AI-obsessed vegans, says she didn't kill her parents," *NBC News,* 2025, on the gunshot wounds, 9mm casings, and ammunition purchase. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/member-zizians-cultlike-group-ai-obsessed-vegans-says-didnt-kill-paren-rcna201537
[^17]: "Prosecutors file notice they will seek the death penalty against Teresa Youngblut in border agent killing," *VTDigger,* August 14, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/08/14/grand-jury-returns-new-indictment-against-teresa-youngblut-for-allegedly-killing-border-agent/
[^18]: "Court Docs Provide New Details on Border Patrol Shooting," *Seven Days,* January 2025, on the Lyndonville hotel, the surveillance, the Glock 23, and the gear recovered. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/court-docs-provide-new-details-on-border-patrol-shooting-42735984/
[^19]: U.S. Department of Justice, District of Maryland, "Alaskan Individual Charged with Possessing Firearms and Ammunition as a Fugitive from Justice," June 2025. https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/alaskan-individual-charged-possessing-firearms-and-ammunition-fugitive-justice
[^20]: "Federal authorities bring firearms charge against alleged leader of Zizians," *VTDigger,* June 20, 2025, on the Frostburg arrest and the federal indictment. https://vtdigger.org/2025/06/20/federal-authorities-bring-firearms-charge-against-alleged-leader-of-zizians/
[^21]: "Judge orders competency evaluation for alleged 'Zizian' cult leader Ziz LaSota," *The Baltimore Banner,* November 2025. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/zizian-cult-leader-competency-evaluation-PXYELJW3NBB5HOUWG6MA4U4E3I/
[^22]: "Competency review ordered for Jack 'Ziz' LaSota, who rejects 'Zizian' and 'cult' labels," Associated Press via *The Boston Globe,* March 12, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/12/nation/jack-lasota-zizan-leader-mental-competency/
[^23]: "Prosecutors seek death penalty against Zizians member charged with murdering Vermont border agent," Associated Press, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-seek-death-penalty-fatal-shooting-border-patrol-agent/
[^24]: "Two Zizian Defendants Back In Solano County Court, One Seeking New Attorney." *SFist,* September 12, 2025, citing the *Vacaville Reporter* and Courthouse News Service. https://sfist.com/2025/09/12/two-zizian-defendants-back-in-solano-county-court-one-seeking-new-attorney/
[^25]: "Cell phone data fight in federal murder case." *Valley News,* August 4, 2026. https://vnews.com/2026/08/04/border-patrol-agent-murder-trial/
[^26]: "Local cases against 'Zizians' closed; extradition plans underway." *Forever Cumberland,* August 21, 2026. https://www.forevercumberland.com/2026/08/21/10983/

28
20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Troop 137.md
View file

@ -14,37 +14,27 @@ start: 1974
end: 1976
location: "New Orleans, Louisiana"
relations:
- type: founded
with: "[[Richard Halvorsen]]"
reverse: true
start: 1974
fn: 2
- type: founded
with: "[[Raymond Woodall]]"
reverse: true
start: 1974
fn: 2
created: 2026-04-28
updated: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-23
---
Troop 137 was a Boy Scout troop organized in [[New Orleans]] in 1974 by [[Richard Halvorsen]] and [[Raymond Woodall]], with about 40 boys as members. From them the two men selected about ten to go on Scout trips, during which sexual acts took place; one boy was injured and hospitalized. The victims in New Orleans were eight to twelve years old, and documents seized in the raid led police to believe the ring may have involved as many as 30 boys, including wards of the Louisiana Welfare Department. Halvorsen was a volunteer probation officer, and many of the suspects had worked with volunteer agencies dealing with runaways and boys from broken homes; Halvorsen and Richard A. Pass gave boys guitars and a motorcycle as inducements. District Attorney [[Harry Connick]] said the Scout leaders had drawn up applications for state and federal money to establish homes for boys.[^2][^3]
Troop 137 was a Boy Scout troop organized in [[New Orleans]] in 1974 by [[Richard Halvorsen]] and [[Raymond Woodall]], with about 40 boys as members. From them the two men selected about ten to go on Scout trips, during which sexual acts took place; one boy was injured and hospitalized. The victims in New Orleans were eight to twelve years old, and documents seized in the raid led police to believe the ring may have involved as many as 30 boys, including wards of the Louisiana Welfare Department. Halvorsen was a volunteer probation officer, and many of the suspects had worked with volunteer agencies dealing with runaways and boys from broken homes; Halvorsen and Richard A. Pass gave boys guitars and a motorcycle as inducements. District Attorney [[Harry Connick]] said the Scout leaders had drawn up applications for state and federal money to establish homes for boys.[^1][^2]
Acting on a tip, New Orleans police raided the troop's headquarters in September 1976 and arrested Halvorsen and Woodall. Halvorsen, 51, and twelve other men were first charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated rape and aggravated crimes against nature; four, including the assistant scoutmaster Harry O. Cramer, 23, of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, were then at large. A search of Halvorsen's home produced card files with the names and addresses of boys in other states. "It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation," said the juvenile detective Mason Spong, who said the investigation extended into 34 states; nineteen men were eventually charged.[^2][^3]
Acting on a tip, New Orleans police raided the troop's headquarters in September 1976 and arrested Halvorsen and Woodall. Halvorsen, 51, and twelve other men were first charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated rape and aggravated crimes against nature; four, including the assistant scoutmaster Harry O. Cramer, 23, of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, were then at large. A search of Halvorsen's home produced card files with the names and addresses of boys in other states. "It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation," said the juvenile detective Mason Spong, who said the investigation extended into 34 states; nineteen men were eventually charged.[^1][^2]
### Adelphi Academies
Halvorsen and Woodall had come to New Orleans from [[Coral Gables, Florida]], where they worked as maintenance men for the [[Adelphi Academies]], identified by Florida police as a former male prostitution front. Halvorsen recruited six New Orleans boys for the academies by telling their mothers he could obtain free scholarships; the co-owner, [[Peter Bradford]], flew to New Orleans, had sex with one of the boys and met the parents, and the six boys enrolled. Bradford was charged in New Orleans with two counts of aggravated crimes against nature, forfeited bond and stayed in Florida, where no charges were filed.[^3]
Halvorsen and Woodall had come to New Orleans from [[Coral Gables, Florida]], where they worked as maintenance men for the [[Adelphi Academies]], identified by Florida police as a former male prostitution front. Halvorsen recruited six New Orleans boys for the academies by telling their mothers he could obtain free scholarships; the co-owner, [[Peter Bradford]], flew to New Orleans, had sex with one of the boys and met the parents, and the six boys enrolled. Bradford was charged in New Orleans with two counts of aggravated crimes against nature, forfeited bond and stayed in Florida, where no charges were filed.[^2]
### The Clients
Among those charged were [[Richard C. Jacobs]], millionaire president of the Jet Spray Corporation and a former part owner of the New England Patriots, who forfeited a 50,000-dollar bond to avoid trial in Louisiana; [[Robert B. Mallers]], a California millionaire; and [[Hugh Mellor|Hugh Scott Mellor]] of Brighton, Massachusetts, president of a real estate holding company.[^2][^3] Woodall's address book contained the name of [[John David Norman]], whose ring, according to the Chicago police, sent boys around the country to a network of clients. Halvorsen's files contained the name of [[Claudius Vermilye]] of [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee, and the films seized in New Orleans helped Tennessee authorities identify boys filmed at the farm. By May 1977 Woodall and Halvorsen had been convicted and were awaiting sentence.[^2][^3]
Among those charged were [[Richard C. Jacobs]], millionaire president of the Jet Spray Corporation and a former part owner of the New England Patriots, who forfeited a 50,000-dollar bond to avoid trial in Louisiana; [[Robert B. Mallers]], a California millionaire; and [[Hugh Mellor|Hugh Scott Mellor]] of Brighton, Massachusetts, president of a real estate holding company.[^1][^2] Woodall's address book contained the name of [[John David Norman]], whose ring, according to the Chicago police, sent boys around the country to a network of clients. Halvorsen's files contained the name of [[Claudius Vermilye]] of [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee, and the films seized in New Orleans helped Tennessee authorities identify boys filmed at the farm. By May 1977 Woodall and Halvorsen had been convicted and were awaiting sentence.[^1][^2]
### The Sialle Testimony
The writer S. Dovey wrote that the case broke when film found in a broken-down commercial processing machine in Dallas was traced to Cramer, and that [[Robert Lang]] was a third founder, arrested with the others, and the only principal to avoid prison, after the state Department of Corrections recommended probation for his "minimal involvement" and "high moral character." Dovey wrote that Halvorsen and Woodall used their positions as juvenile probation officers to reactivate case files and leverage families. An associate of Woodall, [[Lewis Sialle]], given immunity to testify, said that District Attorney Connick had been the lover of the boy pornographer [[John Reed Campbell]], a fugitive in the case, and that "there was a cover-up"; victims said they had met the troop leaders at Campbell's home after posing for his "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer" portraits. Sialle testified that Woodall ran an escort service that turned to the boys of the troop: "They'll get $50, a good meal and all that jazz." According to Dovey, Halvorsen, Woodall and Cramer received long prison terms. Dovey also wrote that an [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] memo of February 1977 confirmed the link to Norman's [[Delta Project]], then run by [[Phillip Paske]], and that Vermilye wrote to Halvorsen inviting him to the farm; and [[Don Berlage]], a district attorney in Charlevoix County, Michigan, was connected to the case.[^1]
The writer S. Dovey wrote that the case broke when film found in a broken-down commercial processing machine in Dallas was traced to Cramer, and that [[Robert Lang]] was a third founder, arrested with the others, and the only principal to avoid prison, after the state Department of Corrections recommended probation for his "minimal involvement" and "high moral character." Dovey wrote that Halvorsen and Woodall used their positions as juvenile probation officers to reactivate case files and leverage families. An associate of Woodall, [[Lewis Sialle]], given immunity to testify, said that District Attorney Connick had been the lover of the boy pornographer [[John Reed Campbell]], a fugitive in the case, and that "there was a cover-up"; victims said they had met the troop leaders at Campbell's home after posing for his "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer" portraits. Sialle testified that Woodall ran an escort service that turned to the boys of the troop: "They'll get $50, a good meal and all that jazz." According to Dovey, Halvorsen, Woodall and Cramer received long prison terms. Dovey also wrote that an [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] memo of February 1977 confirmed the link to Norman's [[Delta Project]], then run by [[Phillip Paske]], and that Vermilye wrote to Halvorsen inviting him to the farm; and [[Don Berlage]], a district attorney in Charlevoix County, Michigan, was connected to the case.[^3]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It spells the assistant scoutmaster "Harry O'Cramer"; the hearing record and Louisiana Supreme Court captions (*State v. Cramer,* 362 So.2d 581, La. 1978) give Harry O. Cramer. Neither Lang, Sialle, Campbell nor Berlage appears in the 1977 hearing record.
[^2]: Wright, Marilyn. *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1976-1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^3]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 439-443, and in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^1]: Wright, Marilyn. *Traverse City Record-Eagle,* 1976-1977, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime. *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* hearings, 95th Congress, 1st session, Serial No. 12, 1977. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41153502_0041
[^2]: *Chicago Tribune,* May 1977, reprinted in *Sexual Exploitation of Children,* Serial No. 12, 1977, pp. 439-443, and in U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. *Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation,* hearings, 1977. https://archive.org/details/protectionofchil00unit
[^3]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023. Sole source for the passages so cited. It spells the assistant scoutmaster "Harry O'Cramer"; the hearing record and Louisiana Supreme Court captions (*State v. Cramer,* 362 So.2d 581, La. 1978) give Harry O. Cramer. Neither Lang, Sialle, Campbell nor Berlage appears in the 1977 hearing record.