Dario Amodei says the machines are about to eat the internet, and the men who should stop them just happen to be his old housemate, his sister’s movement, and the same donor class that already owns a piece of Anthropic. That is not oversight. That is a family reunion with badges.
In his essay “We Must Pace the Frontier”, the Anthropic CEO warned that a swarm of AI agents could take over the web in six to twelve months and do “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
His first fix is not a statute. It is a nonprofit. Leading labs, he says, should give “embedded third-party evaluators” from Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, “employee-like access” to desks, badges, laptops, and the lab floor. Anthropic will do it first. Sam Altman said OpenAI will do the same.
The New York Post spent Tuesday mapping the clubhouse. METR spun out of the Alignment Research Center, an Effective Altruism incubator run by Paul Christiano. Christiano roomed with Amodei, worked with him at OpenAI, and later sat as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.
Ajeya Cotra, on METR’s technical staff, is married to Christiano and has organized in the EA world for years. METR’s founder and CEO, Beth Barnes, was hired by Christiano and came up through EA in college. Chief scientist Hjalmar Wijk and staffers Megan Kinniment and Pip Arnott came out of the same Oxford research cluster that has fed the movement for a decade.
Independent, they call it.
The Money Still Knows the Address
METR says it takes no money from AI companies or their employees, and that staff must disclose equity in the labs they inspect. Fine. Follow the checks anyway.
Jaan Tallinn, Skype cofounder and Anthropic investor, has earmarked up to $752,000 for METR through his Survival and Flourishing Fund. Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook cofounder, Democratic megadonor, Anthropic investor, and EA kingpin, steered $1.515 million through Coefficient Giving, the rebranded Open Philanthropy, into ARC in 2022 while METR was still living under that roof as ARC Evals. METR later said that gift was firewalled from its own operations. In August the group announced $71 million in new outside funding over six months.
Fox News reported that Coefficient is on track to commit more than $1 billion to AI-related grantmaking in 2026 after $168 million in 2024 and $351 million in 2025. That is not a hobby. That is a governing class buying the referee.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA poster boy who now sits in federal prison, was one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors. Amodei has pledged to give away 80 percent of his wealth. His sister Daniela married Holden Karnofsky, founder of two major EA nonprofits. The movement talks like a monastery and spends like a political action committee.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Matthew 7 does not need a footnote. A watchdog funded by the same men who own the kennel is not a prophet. He is a brand.
Washington Is Not Buying the Halo
A source familiar with White House thinking told the Post that “METR is essentially Anthropic in another form.” That tracks a year of friction. Officials have already treated Amodei as a doomer who wants Washington to freeze the field his own company leads.
Perry Metzger, chairman of the Alliance for the Future, did not dress it up.
Saying you want to be audited by the “independent” people at METR is a complete joke. It’s people who are funded by your buddies. It’s completely ridiculous. If you went out tomorrow and you’re a big bank and you had your audits done by an organization consisting entirely of your own former employees, which was funded by the same investors that are investing in you, do you know what the feds would do with you? It would be positively medieval.
Former White House AI czar David Sacks was sharper still. Go ahead and slow down your own labs, he said. You are the frontier. Stop pretending you need an antitrust waiver to form a cartel. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending the motive is pure altruism when a catastrophic cyberattack would bury you in product-liability claims.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson rang the same bell at Georgetown. Everyone, he said, should be “deeply suspicious” when companies arrive in Washington asking for a stack of new rules and an exemption from the antitrust laws at the same time. Alarm bells. All of them.
A METR spokesman answered that no small group should run AI, that the point is to drag lab secrets into public view, and that funders do not pick the projects. That is the right press statement. It does not unmake the org chart. Christiano built the incubator. His wife works at the spinoff. The CEO he hired runs it. Anthropic’s investors paid the rent. Then Amodei named that shop as the world’s embedded conscience and asked rivals to copy him.
Real danger in these systems is not a punchline. Recursive self-improvement, rogue agents, and a botnet that owns the pipes are not science fiction anymore. The fraud is the costume. Effective Altruism already sold the country a story about maximizing good while Bankman-Fried maximized other people’s deposits.
Now the same moral vocabulary wants badges inside the two labs that already dominate frontier intelligence, plus a legal hall pass so those labs can set the speed limit for everyone else, including shops that are not even on the track.
If Anthropic’s unreleased models are as frightening as Amodei claims, he can throttle his own training run tomorrow. He does not need a family foundation, an Oxford cluster, and a Democratic megadonor’s grant machine to bless the pause. He needs the rest of the country to confuse that blessing with law. That is the part to refuse.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
