There are plenty of ideas about who should help ensure artificial intelligence does not realize humanity’s worst fears. But according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the answer is a handpicked circle of woke adherents tied to a globalist left-wing movement.
In an essay written amid intensifying debates over regulating the AI frontier, Amodei proposed that companies permit “embedded third-party evaluators” from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR. Those evaluators would receive “employee-like access” to oversee safety practices and help ensure advanced AI models don't go rogue.
The problem is that METR is deeply intertwined with Silicon Valley’s effective altruism movement, a left-wing social and philosophical project devoted to “maximizing the global good," a utilitarian philosophy that has a bad habit in politics of trampling over individual rights and human dignity in order to achieve it's goals.
Meet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s handpicked super-woke globalists he thinks will save us from an AI apocalypse. Read today's cover here: https://t.co/vdhqenPM9e pic.twitter.com/j2WimVa75l
— New York Post (@nypost) September 16, 2026
The nonprofit emerged from ARC Evals, a project of the Alignment Research Center, which sits squarely within the effective altruism ecosystem. That same sprawling but closely knit network has helped shape Anthropic’s leadership, research culture, investor base, and approach to catastrophic AI risk. In other words, the proposed outside monitor may be less of an outsider than a familiar face from within Silicon Valley.
The overlap, however, is not merely philosophical. ARC leader Paul Christiano previously worked with and was friends with Dario Amodei, and he held an early position on Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. METR leaders also have professional or family ties to Christiano, while effective-altruism-aligned donors have supported METR’s broader orbit and even invested in Anthropic.
Critics cited by the New York Post argue that those shared personnel, investors, and assumptions about AI risk create a possible conflict of interest, and a severe one at that, that could make the purported watchdog less inclined to challenge the companies they are meant to monitor because it exists within its own professional circle.
METR, however, denies that characterization.
Thankfully, there is another path, and conservatives, of all people, should recognize the stakes in choosing it.
Washington can build a new federal AI regulatory empire, handing a government-certified monopoly to OpenAI, Anthropic, and the other deep-pocketed firms. Or policymakers can take the less glamorous, more sensible, and most productive route: enforce existing laws, preserve market competition, and adapt established legal tools to address genuine harms as they emerge.
Fraud is still fraud. Price fixing is still price fixing. Discrimination, privacy violations, intellectual-property theft, and consumer deception do not become new problems merely because a company using new technology is behind them.
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