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Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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"

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.

> 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.

The worst part here is that there is no guarantee that others will catch up in the near to medium term. Their bleeding-edge research culture and strong focus on software engineering above everything else are two competitive advantages that no other frontier labs are even trying to do the hard work in these areas required to displace.

My impression is Claude is trained to work in production systems and behaves that way instinctively. Some copypasta/context I often feed it is that I am the only user, no production data exists, any data that exists is mine and I accept responsibility for breakage, there is no public release yet, avoid compatibility shims, etc. Stuff like that. Claude will usually get right on board with having a window to make big changes now to avoid technical debt. But you are correct its instincts are very conservative.

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/

Have you considered the possibility that the quality of Claude is a direct consequence of Anthropic's nannying?

It has to be in spite of because things that I don't like are bad.

That's a really good point. There are types of people (like ones who are really anal about following QA/release processes, folks who are insanely paranoid about security), that I've found to be really unpleasant to interact with, but with time, I've come to realize them being exactly like this is what allows me to sleep soundly at night.

No, it doesn't have anything to do with code quality. It will block me from things I'm trying to do for "moral" not technical reasons.

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.

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.

I read it less as a conspiracy and more as an indictment.

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.

>Since no one likes identifying themselves as a slimy businessperson with a potential personality disorder,

Eh, you'd be surprised.

They might joke about it, but most people see themselves as one of history's protagonists.

> 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-...

Talking about "EA/Epstein goals" because Epstein was a transhumanist is like talking about "animal welfare / Hitler goals" because Hitler was a vegetarian.

Except, no, it's less reasonable than that because vegetarianism is much more central to animal welfare than transhumanism is to EA. So perhaps the analogy should be "Buddhist/Hitler goals"; some Buddhists are vegetarians and see vegetarianism as fundamental, some not.

Except, no, it's less reasonable than that because that link you provided doesn't actually give any indication that Epstein was a transhumanist, it just shows that he was into eugenics. So now we have an extra level of indirection: Epstein was a eugenicist; there's some overlap between eugenicists and transhumanists; there's some overlap between transhumanists and EAs; so if someone is an EA we should talk about their "EA/Epstein goals".

So I guess an appropriate analogy would be: Hitler was a vegetarian; there's substantial overlap between vegetarians and Buddhists; there's substantial overlap between Buddhists and pacifists; so if we discover that someone is a pacifist we should talk about their "pacifist/Hitler goals".

This style of thinking is absolutely toxic and I wish it would stop.

[EDITED to remove a first sentence that on reflection I think was not helpful.]

No the EA people are very much Epstein related. As I said, Dario's wife was pitching him for a porn site. I'll add that all of these people are extreme Zionists. Anthropic helped murder an entire school of girls in Iran. So I think it's more of a Hitler/Hitler situation.

> No the EA people are very much Epstein related. As I said, Dario's wife was pitching him for a porn site.

I'm not saying there's nothing there, but that link as you state it doesn't speak very much to ideological "alignment" between her and Epstein. The more plausible explanation is she wanted investment money, he was rich, she made an attempt to get it from him and it's nothing more than that (and she has bad judgement by not disassociating with him).

> I'll add that all of these people are extreme Zionists. Anthropic helped murder an entire school of girls in Iran. So I think it's more of a Hitler/Hitler situation.

That's a ridiculous overstatement: you make it sound like Anthropic was in the room knowingly making that decision, when it was more like some kind of Pentagon target analysis system used Claude.

Would you blame Intel if the app where someone hit the "OK, bombing approved" button was running on an Intel CPU?

Anthropic won't even let me do security testing on my own software but it lets the US government bomb people. Yes, I blame them. Intel isn't in the decision making loop, Anthropic is, chips aren't "aligned".

IMHO, you need to be more careful and precise in your criticism. Your comments up-thread have a conspiratorial free-association vibe that makes them less credible and less impactful.

Let me check whether I understand the alleged links here.

In 2011 and 2012, Camilla Clark was trying to get funding for a pornographic movie. Someone put her in touch with Jeffrey Epstein, and he eventually said no. So far as I know, that is the extent of her connection with Epstein.

In 2014, Camilla Clark began dating Dario Amodei. They married in 2022.

Camilla Clark has, so far as I know, no connection at all with "effective altruism".

Dario Amodei has, so far as I know, no direct connection with "effective altruism" beyond the fact that he runs an AI company with some pretensions to care about safety, and many AI company employees, especially ones who claim to care about safety, are into "effective altruism".

So it goes something like this: EA -- Anthropic employees -- Dario Amodei -- Camilla Clark -- Jeffrey Epstein.

And on the basis of this you talk about "EA/Epstein goals" and claim that those (whatever they might actually be -- you have not so far mentioned any single goal that Epstein is known to share with EAs in general, never mind with Anthropic) are what Anthropic are trying to achieve. This is beyond ridiculous.

Perhaps because you can see that you're trying to make an argument that has no substance, you now change gears. "All of these people are extreme Zionists". All of them? Extreme? There's plenty to dislike about what Israel has been doing lately, but I find myself less convinced than I would like to be that what you mean isn't actually "look, lots of them are Jewish, and the Jews are bad". I don't like the historical precedents for where that sort of thinking leads.

And another screeching gear-change. The US military made use of an Anthropic model, and they didn't check what it said, and they ended up killing a lot of children. That's every bit as bad as you are suggesting but it doesn't have much to do with Anthropic. If they typed up the plans in Microsoft Word and discussed them with iPhones, are Microsoft and Apple also responsible for the murderous incompetence of (at least some) US military leadership?

(You may remember that Anthropic made a bit of news at around that time by being the only one of the major AI labs that made any attempt not to just roll over and do whatever the Pentagon wanted.)

I do love it, though, when the antisemites lump in frontier AI companies in their conspiracy theories. It has echoes of Nazi Germany’s banning of nuclear science as “Jewish physics” (or as they would’ve called it if open antisemitism were unpopular: the Einstein class).

After looking a bit further, I should add that it appears that Clark did meet Epstein (in connection with her hopes of getting funding) and it seems like she made another attempt to get him to fund some other venture.

Again, so far as I can tell none of this indicates any shared goals or values.

(It was all after Epstein's 2008 conviction. But the accusation here is that somehow this says something about Amodei's goals and values, or those of "effective altruism", rather than whether Amodei was willing to marry someone who once failed to do a background check on someone she was told might help fund her business.)

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

Epstein was also pretty big on getting bitcoin going, for _obvious_ reasons.

Source for Dario’s wife?

Edit: thanks for adding! Interesting stuff.

No worries. Sorry for not replying directly, I was throttled.

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