What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released.
If the LLM causes extreme danger to the public or national security, it's covered.
Selling an LLM, knowing that it will materially support terrorism: material support for terrorism. Up to life in prison.
One prominent example among METR's public donors includes the "Survival and Flourishing Fund" [2], primarily funded by Jaan Tallinn and Dustin Moskovitz. Also known as a reliable source of funding for the hobby horses of the LessWrong/Rationalism in-group and various EA causes.
Jaan Tallinn is an early Skype employee, now billionaire, who was an early investor in Anthropic and led their Series A. Known for frequent prognostications about AI x-risk killing us all soon, while reliably investing in the hottest new AI companies (in Anthropic's case making him billions).
(As trivia, Tallinn also bought the Lighthaven property used for numerous rationality community/EA events and gave it to Lightcone Infrastructure LLC which runs lesswrong.com, after the FTX bankruptcy trustee sought to repossess it to repay victims as it was originally purchased with FTX donations prior to the collapse).
Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder who created the major EA-aligned non-profit Coefficient Giving (previously known as Open Philanthropy before FTX tainted the reputation of EA non-profits in orbit of the FTX Future Fund). He appointed Holden Karnofsky as head of Open Philanthropy in 2014, who also happens to be Dario Amodei's brother-in-law by marriage to his sister (and President of Anthropic) Daniela Amodei. Karnofsky now works for Anthropic as of 2025.
In 2017, Dustin Moskovitz via Open Philanthropy gave OpenAI a grant of $30 million [3] which at the time was their largest single donation ever and entitled them to a board seat which was given to Holden Karnofsky.
METR insists they "cannot accept donations made by or at the direction of frontier AI company employees" but there are direct links between investors that are clearly visible even looking at just a single degree of separation like the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
Deeper dives into other pooled funds would reveal more overlap given the Silicon Valley AI safety/AI capabilities research community consists of a small core group of the same wealthy tech people. Which makes any attempted barriers between them laughably porous, and consequently makes any real independence/autonomy for METR without capture by the interests of the AI labs highly questionable.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa...
[2] https://survivalandflourishing.fund/recommendations
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170406023033/http://www.openph...