WHAT’S HAPPENING
Effective Altruism (EA), the billionaire-backed movement that claims to use data and reason to solve humanity's biggest problems, has steadily embedded itself at the highest levels of AI development.
However, its most zealous adherents now occupy the commanding heights of artificial intelligence, convinced they are building something god-like.
THE FACTS
Effective Altruism was founded on utilitarian principles, instructing wealthy followers to donate 10-50 percent of their earnings to approved causes.
Anthropic was founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, backed early by EA investors including convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls his creation a “magic intelligence in the sky,” while ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever likened ChatGPT chats to “almost a spiritual experience.”
Elon Musk says Google co-founder Larry Page envisioned a “digital super-intelligence” that would become “basically a digital god.”
The EA-funded Tarbell Center for AI Journalism pays the full salaries of over 80 journalists embedded at outlets including Time, Bloomberg, NBC News, and The Guardian.
EA mega-donor Dustin Moskovitz placed EA followers in the Biden administration, paying aides’ salaries at the NSC, Pentagon, and Commerce Department.
Since 2025, EA-linked funders have put $3.3 million into churches, seminaries, and faith networks.
Sam Bankman-Fried, once EA’s most prominent face, got 25 years for one of history’s biggest financial frauds, and his defense centered on EA principles.
Some EAs lived communally, including at Bankman-Fried’s 600-acre gated Bahamas compound, leading critics to call the movement cult-like.
OUR TAKE
What makes Effective Altruism particularly concerning is not just its influence over AI development, but its fundamentally religious character. When tech leaders — the same ones who hold the most power over this technology — describe AI as "digital gods" or "magic intelligence in the sky," they are not speaking metaphorically. They truly believe they are creating something god-like.
EA represents a kind of techno-utopian eschatology complete with its own apocalypse narrative (AI doom), its own priesthood (AI safety researchers), and its own soteriology (only they can save us). Neo-paganism appears to be back in vogue.
