Sam Bankman-Fried is in federal prison.
But the network he built – and the money he spent – is still running Silicon Valley's AI safety machine.
Dario Amodei just nominated that network to regulate him.
The Scheme Behind the Safety Speech
Amodei published an essay last Saturday called "We Must Pace the Frontier." The pitch sounded reasonable: AI is getting dangerous, companies need independent outside watchdogs, and his pick for the job is a nonprofit called METR – the Model Evaluation and Threat Research organization.
What he didn't lead with is that METR was seeded with money from the FTX Foundation – Sam Bankman-Fried's charity operation – to the tune of $1.25 million.
METR's founder and CEO, Beth Barnes, worked alongside Amodei at OpenAI while he was building the very technology he now wants METR to police.
Paul Christiano, who founded the original version of METR, has described his work as a form of effective altruism – the same movement that produced Bankman-Fried, funded Anthropic's early rounds, and is now quietly running the AI oversight infrastructure Amodei wants embedded inside every major tech company.
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, who financed Anthropic's Series A, has donated more than $1 million to effective altruism-adjacent causes and spoken at their global conferences.
Amodei's proposal asks frontier AI companies to give METR "employee-like access" to their internal pipelines, their training processes, their safety commitments.
He wants his former colleagues – funded by his former investors – embedded inside his competitors.
What Regulatory Capture Actually Looks Like
Perry Metzger, chairman of the Alliance for the Future, said exactly what this is.
"Saying you want to be audited by the 'independent' people at METR is a complete joke," Metzger told the New York Post. "It's people who are funded by your buddies. It's completely ridiculous."
This has a name: regulatory capture. Powerful companies write the rules, then hand-pick who enforces them.
The airlines did it for 40 years at the Civil Aeronautics Board – zero new competitors approved.
Now Amodei is doing it live, using the language of safety and a nonprofit his own network built.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson saw it immediately. He warned that "everyone should be deeply suspicious" of any request to let AI companies coordinate safety efforts through an antitrust exemption.
A source familiar with White House thinking told reporters that METR's involvement would go nowhere with the Trump administration.
"METR is essentially Anthropic in another form," the source said.
This Isn't Amodei's First Attack on Trump
There is a reason the administration isn't inclined to trust Amodei's version of "safety."
Ahead of the 2024 election, Amodei called Trump a "feudal warlord" in a Facebook post he later deleted, and he urged his network to vote for Kamala Harris. Two years earlier, he had described Trump as a "serious and legitimate threat to the rule of law" and told Americans to "vote against this clown."
Anthropic's founders, investors, and employees sent 99.8 percent of $200 million in political donations to Democrats.
So when Amodei says the government needs his hand-picked evaluators embedded inside America's AI companies, Trump's team isn't hearing a neutral safety expert. They're hearing a Harris donor asking for a permanent seat at the table.
Trump Just Answered
Trump didn't wait for Amodei to finish his pitch.
On Saturday – the same day Fox News covered the METR story – the president announced he is forming an AI Force, rejecting the entire premise of Amodei's regulatory framework.
"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows," Trump posted on Truth Social. "We will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System."
Trump compared the AI Force to Space Force – his creation from his first term – and announced he will soon name an AI Czar.
He called fears that AI will destroy humanity a hoax and said the priority is simple: the U.S. beats China.
"Whoever wins AI wins."
That is the correct answer. Not because safety doesn't matter. Because the people proposing to define "safety" have a $580 million conflict of interest, a convicted fraudster in their founding story, and a referee they hand-selected from their own team.
The Playbook Hasn't Changed
Critics watching this unfold say Amodei isn't inventing anything new.
He is using the exact same playbook Sam Bankman-Fried used before he got caught – warn about catastrophic risk, propose yourself as the solution, build regulations that only established players can afford to comply with.
Bankman-Fried lobbied Washington for crypto regulations designed to crush his smaller competitors while he was running what prosecutors later proved was a $3 billion fraud.
He led Anthropic's $580 million funding round in April 2022. Months later, FTX collapsed.
The money is gone. The network is still running.
Amodei's Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit just days before Amodei published his essay, warning that both Anthropic and OpenAI were "gambling with our lives" without adequate oversight. That gave Amodei his news hook.
What Coxon didn't mention: Amodei's solution to the gambling problem is to let the house set the rules.
Trump's AI Force – overseen by American law enforcement, accountable to American voters, and not embedded inside a nonprofit funded by a convicted fraudster's charity arm – is the right approach.
Amodei had the audacity to call his proposal independent oversight.
He picked his own referee. His referee used to work for him. His referee was funded by his investors.
And the lead investor is serving 25 years.
Sources:
- Leo Briceno, "Who Is Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO Pushing Independent AI Oversight?" Fox News, September 19, 2026.
- "Meet Dario Amodei's Handpicked Super Woke Globalists Who Claim They'll Save Us from an AI Apocalypse," Lifezette, September 16, 2026.
- "Questions Mount Over METR's Independence as Amodei Calls for Outside AI Oversight," yourNEWS, September 16, 2026.
- "Against AI Regulatory Capture," Townhall, September 18, 2026.
- "Trump Vows to Form 'AI Force,' Says He Won't Allow Slowdown of AI Development," Fox News/CBS News, September 19, 2026.
- "Anthropic Donors Gave 99.8% of $200M to Dems, CEO Calls Trump 'Feudal Warlord,'" Breitbart, March 15, 2026.
- "Sam Bankman-Fried Is the Spiritual (and Financial) Godfather of Anthropic AI," HotAir, September 18, 2026.
