A Facebook billionaire is using a government loophole to quietly place followers of the controversial “effective altruism” movement in key national security roles in the Biden administration.
Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm mate, is paying the salaries of a group of aides in the White House’s National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce in an arrangement which puts advocates of the movement at the heart of government.
“Effective altruism” (known as EA) has gained billionaire Silicon Valley followers for its philosophy of encouraging people to make as much money as possible then turn to giving it to what it sees as noble causes.
The movement’s leaders include Moskovitz and wife Cari Tuna and Skype’s Estonian co-founder Jann Tallinn, while Elon Musk has said that while he is not a follower or funder, it is a close match for his philosophy.
But it was plunged into crisis by the fall its most high-profile advocate, jailed former crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried.
Now movement it is quietly trying to re-build ties to power, including at the heart of the White House — and the roles reflect the effective altruism’s growing interest in AI, which its leaders have spoken out against.
The key funder of the bid to have its followers in the White House is 39-year-old Moskovitz, whose Facebook fortune is worth $18 billion, runs Open Philanthropy, which in turns distributes cash to a network of associated think tanks and projects.
One of those non-profits, the Center for Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, known as CSET — to which Open Philanthropy gave $55 million — is paying the salaries of the “fellows” who hold government roles with high-level security access.
Among the fellows is Andrew Lohn, the National Security Council’s director for “emerging technology.”
The other fellows they are paying for — the salaries they receive are undisclosed — also have roles which appear close to government work on AI.
Diana Gelhaus, a CSET fellow, currently serves as the senior advisor for talent in the chief digital and Artificial Intelligence office at the Department of Defense, giving her a crucial say in who the Pentagon hires for AI projects.
Emily Weinstein serves as a senior advisor in the office of the Undersecretary of Industry and Security at the Department of Commerce.
Will Hunt, a former CSET staffer, served as a special advisor to the CHIPS Act office at the Department of Commerce. The CHIPS Act aims to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US particularly for AI computing.
They are able to be paid by the outside non-profit through a little-known law, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970, that facilitates short-term hiring of outside experts, bypassing normal procedures.
“I view these fellowships as an important training opportunity for researchers, which is why CSET funds one-year fellowships for our personnel in line with established procedures, such as the Intergovernmental Personnel Act,” Dewey Murdick, the executive director of CSET, said in email to The Post.
A spokesman for Open Philanthropy said the organization is removed from CSET’s work — and said that the staffers in the Biden administration were not necessarily EA ideologues.
“While Open Philanthropy is proud to have supported Georgetown’s research on things like how AI can be used in national security settings, it wouldn’t be appropriate to take credit for an independent grantee’s programmatic decisions,” Mike Levine, a spokesman for Open Philanthropy told The Post.
“CSET is fully in charge of hiring, research, regranting, and collaborations with others in academia and government, including via fellowships. We had no involvement in any of these secondments.”
The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
But critics say that proponents of EA are being given an inside track on AI regulation, at the same time as companies with ties to the EA movement are seeking to make money in the area.
A current trend being pushed in AI governance is to pre-test or “audit” companies’ AI models.
In November, President Joe Biden sign an executive order on AI, which was drawn up with help from RAND Corporation, the venerable California think tank which has recently received an infusion of cash from EA groups.
It pushed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to “create guidance and benchmarks for evaluating and auditing AI capabilities.”
One of the companies involved in developing auditing systems is Anthropic, which has long had ties to the EA movement, including getting investment cash from Bankman-Fried.
Effective altruism took off in 2011 when Scottish-born philosopher William MacAskill was inspired by a 1972 essay called “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” by Australian bioethicist Peter Singer and founded the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford, England.
It rapidly found followers in Silicon Valley, with Bankman-Fried saying that he was motivated to set up FTX and make billions so he could use his fortune for philanthropy — only to end up convicted of fraud and facing life in prison.
Proponents of developing artificial intelligence suggest that EA has increasingly pushed a doomsday philosophy about the idea of unchecked artificial intelligence, leading to a split between it and “effective acceleration,” a term coined by tech investor Marcus Andreessen.
“The EA people stand out as talking about a whole different topic, in a whole different style,” Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and former effective altruist, told Politico.
“They’re giving pretty abstract arguments about a pretty abstract concern, and they’re ratcheting up the stakes to the max.”
