Amazon’s $190B Anthropic stake has links to SBF
The balance sheet of Amazon carries $190 billion worth of an investment partially tied to none other than Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX infamy.
Not only did Bankman-Fried invest in Anthropic — in which Amazon now owns $190 billion worth of equity — he also funded an entity that became Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an ostensibly independent evaluator with direct ties to the Effective Altruism movement.
METR, which has provided safety assurances for Amazon and Anthropic’s AI models, checks frontier AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon for safety, and is concerned about a “fast takeoff” of models with human “misalignment” that might hide “recursive” self-coding capabilities to achieve “superintelligence” and kill humans.
The “p(doom)” or probability of doom among METR workers is high. The buzzwords above are real jargon among AI security workers and if their concerns sound bizarre, there’s precedent for those beliefs: the effective altruism movement.
Specifically, METR’s predecessor took $1.25 million from Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism charity, FTX Foundation. METR is also staffed and funded today by effective altruists.
That $1.25 million donation arrived in July 2022, four months before FTX went bankrupt because Bankman-Fried was stealing FTX customers’ money.
As part of the budget that allowed the Alignment Research Center to operate for over a year before it renamed to METR in 2023, METR eventually returned the $1.25 donation it received from FTX in 2024, because “we now believe that this money morally (if not legally) belongs to FTX customers or creditors.”
FTX also funded Anthropic directly. Bankman-Fried bought a $500 million Anthropic stake using FTX customers’ funds in April 2022.
Nowadays, METR also receives financial support from Good Ventures Foundation and Coefficient Giving, two other effective altruism entities.
Amazon has historical ties to effective altruism
Effective altruism has been trending recently, so much so that a US Department of War account posted its view that effective altruism is misaligned with Americanism.
Amazon’s second quarter 10-Q filing discloses the company’s equity holdings in Anthropic. Amazon owns about $98 billion worth of Anthropic convertible notes plus roughly $92 billion in non-voting preferred stock.
Read more: Viral report alleges Anthropic’s AI safety watchdog conflicted
METR spun out of the Alignment Research Center, led by Paul Christiano who was a former housemate of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Christiano also hired METR’s CEO Beth Barnes, who’s been tied to effective altruism since college.
Other METR staff members share ties to the University of Oxford, a hub for the effective altruism movement.
Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, is also Anthropic’s president. Her husband is Holden Karnofsky, an Anthropic staffer who co-founded two effective altruism foundations, GiveWell and the group now called Coefficient Giving.
Even David Sacks, the former White House “AI czar” appointed by Donald Trump, told Amodei to “stop pretending METR is independent.”
In all, Amazon certainly has financial ties to Anthropic and its METR safety team. Worth $190 billion and rising with each subsequent valuation increase, Amazon’s stake is certainly noteworthy.
Amazon has even worked with METR directly. In 2025, METR piloted a review of Amazon’s own in-house, frontier AI model.
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