Comment by slowin
4 hours ago
I feel like people forget that FTX was an early major investor in Anthropic. The origins of Anthropic are incredibly shady and tie into the Effective Altruism scene. They also have Epstein ties with Dario's wife pitching Epstein for funding on a porn site.
I don't actually think Anthropic will achieve its goal of getting AGI before everyone else and creating an effective moat where it can deploy that AGI to achieve EA/Epstein goals, but it's concerning that they're trying to!
FTX Investment:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/ftx-estate-sells-majority-st...
Dario's wife and Epstein:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/08/14/who-is-...
Claude is a solid tool, but Anthropic creeps me out.
I agree, I really like Claude and use it as my primary driver. Anthropic creeps me out too and I really resent its increasingly excessive nannying.
Have you considered the possibility that the quality of Claude is a direct consequence of Anthropic's nannying?
3 replies →
Same. Opus 5.5 was my first exposure to a finally smart-enough model and I was blown away at how it reverse engineered everything I pointed it at. But after a few weeks, the undecipherable prose and "safety-first" everything are making it increasingly unpleasant for my toy project. I really don't care if it breaks anything, just merge the damn PR and stop roadblocking me. Oh and I guess I need to start being less curt with it, or else Anthropic may decide I'm verbally abusing their token generator and ban me?
I'll use the best tool for the job, but I am eagerly awaiting for others to catch up so I can stop giving money to those weirdos. I'm proactively going to start shifting my usage to OpenAI, and then diversify further into other providers as they get good enough.
Same. Their writing always feels sleazy and dishonest, like they're faking a disgusting aura of paternalistic integrity.
A good thought to keep in mind about Anthropic:
> "Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
Source: https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropics-safety-superpower/
The whole "model welfare" rules are pure delusion, I will never rely on an inference provider that comes up with arbitrary rules like that one.
Imagine using the claude API to process user data as part of your system and one day you wake up to an elevated failure rate alert because the AI provider decided it isn't safe for the model to be exposed to insults, or whatever other perfectly legal but gross, edgy, denigrating topics they think are off limit. If they would have set a high threshold there could be an argument to have (still delusional though, those models are purely static, compressed datasets). But they already set the bar ridiculously low by barring "being mean to claude"
I think Claude is way too expensive for what it delivers. I honestly prefer the Chinese models for the work I do.
because "AI safety" is a doomsday cult.
it was started by genuine Internet schizos but it's now thoroughly co-opted by greasy salesmen.
> I don't actually think Anthropic will achieve its goal of getting AGI before everyone else and creating an effective moat where it can deploy that AGI to achieve EA/Epstein goals, but it's concerning that they're trying to!
You lost me with "Epstein goals." What do you think those were?
Because to me his goals seemed to have been pretty small, self-centered, and unrelated to AI/AGI (beyond creating the appearance that he was a smart renaissance man).
Epstein was a trans-humanist and big into eugenics (the baby breeding labs...). This is why the John Brockman/Edge people were ideologically aligned with him. He even called it "genetic altruism":
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/epstein-emails-...
A lot of SV is tied to the Effective Altruism scene. It kind of has to be. If you make absolutely insane amounts of money with anti-consumer and legally-grey business practices, you have to somehow justify what you're doing. Since no one likes identifying themselves as a slimy businessperson with a potential personality disorder, they look for positive ways to frame it.
There's really no redeeming that area at this point.
This is getting causation backwards. Effective Altruism was a relatively small scene that attracted some people who understood the importance of AI early. It’s not all that surprising that some of those people went on to start AI labs later.
You can make a conspiracy out of it, but it’s sort of like thinking people who met in school had it all planned out from the beginning.
it's more of a condemnation of their moral compass as followers of an ideology. i don't think it's tinfoil hatting to say some of these people are completely divorced from what their average peer thinks about the value of society and human connections.
I read it less as a conspiracy and more as an indictment.
i think part of the reason was ant had really really hard time raising their A bc at the time nobody believed second frontier lab was possible. similar to that other nuclear energy startup taking money from putin/epstein tainted fund
Source for Dario’s wife?
Edit: thanks for adding! Interesting stuff.
No worries. Sorry for not replying directly, I was throttled.
Epstein was also pretty big on getting bitcoin going, for _obvious_ reasons.