The $43 Billion Machine
Executive Summary
The Bull Moose Project has released a report detailing how a small network of Effective Altruist megadonors and the people behind Anthropic — its co-founders, board members, investors, and employees — has quietly built one of the most concentrated political and philanthropic machines in modern American history. What began as an "AI safety" movement has consolidated into a $43 billion pipeline channeling capital into left-of-center causes, dark money operations, and a regulatory agenda aimed squarely at the Trump administration. The report documents that this donor class has already deployed $5.9 billion and publicly committed another $37.8 billion to follow, with combined political giving exceeding $611 million — 99.8 percent of which has gone to Democrats.
At the center is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, whose Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has distributed $3.9 billion in grants while making $135 million in political donations, 100 percent to Democrats and zero to Republicans. Reid Hoffman, Reed Hastings, and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried round out a funder class that has built a sprawling infrastructure of front groups, captive think tanks, and fiscal sponsors — including The Center for AI Safety, the Future of Life Institute, the Tides Foundation, and Arabella Advisors — that launder donor intent through the language of "safety" and "governance."
The report further documents how ideological homogeneity inside Anthropic has hardened into open confrontation with the White House. President Trump has blacklisted the company from all federal agencies and called its leaders "Leftwing nut jobs." Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has designated Anthropic a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security" — a classification previously reserved for adversary nations. White House AI Czar David Sacks has accused the company of "sophisticated regulatory capture." Anthropic's response was to sue the sitting President in federal court, becoming the first major AI company ever to do so. At the state level, the EA network has begun replicating California's restrictive SB 53 in Utah, Nebraska, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, while Coefficient Giving–funded fellowship programs have embedded EA-aligned personnel across Senate offices, the Department of War, DHS, the State Department, and NIST.
When the company's seven co-founders begin liquidating equity under their 80 percent giving pledges, tens of billions in new politically aligned philanthropic capital will flood a nonprofit ecosystem that already opposes federal preemption, Pentagon AI deployment, and the administration's China competition agenda. Without aggressive federal preemption, sunlight on dark money pass-throughs, and scrutiny of fellowship and front-group operations, the $43 billion machine threatens not merely Republican electoral prospects in 2026 but the integrity of American AI policy at the precise moment the country can least afford to cede ground to Beijing.
