How Effective Altruism Bought the Media

AI Doomers are Funding Circular Potemkin Articles

September 2, 2026Updated August 31, 20264 minute read

The fight for control of the AI narrative has reached egregious new heights. An Effort investigation uncovered Potemkin articles, in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem. To understand how this works, follow us through this Guardian article. Of its 6 participants — including the journalist and publisher — 6/6 are paid for by three megadonors.

Coefficient Giving pays the salary of the journalist through the Tarbell Fellowship. It pays the publisher, the Guardian, more than $3M. AI 2027, the subject of the article, was given $400K from Coefficient, in addition to $2M from SFF. The three other pseudo-experts quoted in the article are all paid by SFF, Coefficient, or Effective Ventures Foundation.¹

The Guardian does not disclose that it is funded by Coefficient or that the journalist is entirely paid for by Tarbell. In a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its “fierce independence.”

Down declares her fellow Coefficient funding recipients “experts” without justification. She proclaims Kokotajlo “a leading artificial intelligence expert” without any specific record or achievement. Kokotajlo and the other authors of AI 2027 and AI 2040 already admitted their predictions were off by years, if not decades.

All six belong to a circular ecosystem known as “AI Safety,” united around the belief that AI will end the human race.² What Down promotes as ‘expertise’ is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated — it is a work of cultlike fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a firehose of anti-AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright — the price of preventing the apocalypse.

This ecosystem is bankrolled by three megadonors — Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), and Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. The media arm of this empire has over $40 million in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups.

The Center for Effective Altruism ran into a major roadblock after its primary donor, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested and convicted in 2023 for fraud. It later rebranded to Effective Ventures Foundation.

After Bankman-Fried’s arrest, Open Philanthropy began to distance themselves from the Effective Altruism movement. It later rebranded to Coefficient Giving. “Our mission remains the same,” their official statement assures.

Coefficient pays the salaries of two dozen journalists at major news outlets through the Tarbell Fellowship program.

The largest Coefficient-funded outlet, TIME, recently drew criticism for prioritizing anti-AI activists over Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable public company in the world. What few of those critics know is that the outright majority of TIME 100 profiles — 58/100 — are written by Tarbell-paid journalists.

AI Doom content on major YouTube channels is also overwhelmingly sponsored.⁴ Leaked emails also show “AI Safety” organizations covertly sponsor anti-AI content on a variety of anti-AI issue areas, possibly in violation of the FCC’s advertising disclosure regulations.

Sponsorships aren’t without tradeoffs for paid influencers. The largest sponsored videos dramatically underperform unsponsored content.

The AI discussion continues to be flooded with speculation, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods. While part of that can be attributed to the modern condition, the degree of coordinated, circular influence has reached new levels with AI.