# Effective Altruism Was a Philosophy About Giving Money Away Efficiently. The Trump Administration Now Treats It as an Enemy. > A movement that started in 2009 with Oxford philosophers calculating which charities save the most lives per dollar has become the Trump administration's preferred villain in the fight over how AI gets built, and Anthropic is drawing the sharpest fire. - Source: Continental - Canonical URL: https://continental.today/article/effective-altruism-trump-ai-villain - Author: staff - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-09-23T20:40:54.131Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T20:40:54.131Z - Tags: Effective Altruism, Anthropic, AI Policy --- Effective altruism began in 2009 as an academic movement founded by Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill, built on a fairly narrow idea: treat charitable giving like a math problem, and calculate which interventions save the most lives per dollar spent. Seventeen years later, it has become something the Trump administration treats as a genuine adversary in the fight over how artificial intelligence gets built and regulated. The movement's expansion into AI concern traces back to "longtermism," the belief that preventing human extinction and shaping a positive long-term future for humanity carries as much moral weight as, or more than, near-term charitable causes. That idea gained real traction inside EA after philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence and Toby Ord's 2020 book The Precipice, both of which identified poorly controlled AI as a genuine existential risk. Many EA adherents subsequently went to work at the major AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind among them, driven by a belief that the technology they were building could either be enormously good for humanity or destroy it. The pushback from the Trump administration has been pointed and repeated. The Department of War posted that the country needed "Americanism, not effective altruism" and to be "AI DOMINANT." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized the movement's "sanctimonious rhetoric," accusing it of trying to "strong-arm the United States military." Emil Michael, the Pentagon's Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, called EA "dangerous" and "pretty dystopian." Former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks has separately criticized the movement's influence over AI safety policy. Anthropic in particular has drawn direct fire, for reasons that trace back to the company's founding. Several of its cofounders have ties to effective altruism or an aligned philosophy, its early funding included a Series B investment tied to Sam Bankman-Fried before his fraud conviction over the collapse of FTX, and the company restricts how the U.S. military can use its technology. Hegseth's "strong-arm" comment was aimed specifically at Anthropic's use of EA-style rhetoric around that restriction. Trump himself has rejected calls from AI industry leaders, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, for an international slowdown on AI development, and has said a "high IQ president" is the only safeguard the country needs against the technology's risks. He has also called broader AI safety and data-center concerns a "hoax," even as his administration has backed the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure investment announced in January 2025 and grown closer to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Not everyone treats the fight as settled. Andrew Kane, director of Secure AI Policy and a former NIST chief of staff, said "for some people within the White House, the AI safety community and effective altruists have always been an enemy," but noted that concern about AI risk has spread well beyond EA's original base. A Politico poll found 63 percent of Americans believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of causing human extinction, and even some Republican members of Congress who previously opposed any state-level AI regulation are now drafting their own regulatory proposals, a sign the politics of AI risk are shifting even as effective altruism itself remains a favored political target. --- Originally published by Continental. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://continental.today/article/effective-altruism-trump-ai-villain.