The Wrong Whistleblower

Step one · the first source

He wrote the first check, and he wrote most of the others.

Jaan Tallinn helped build Skype, then spent the money on the end of the world. He co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge in 2012 and the Future of Life Institute in 2014, seeded a fund in 2019 to give away his AI money, and in May 2021 co-led Anthropic's first outside round. On this page he is a source: a circle that money leaves and never returns to.

Board observerSomeone who attends board meetings without a vote. Wikipedia gives Tallinn this title at Anthropic; the company's own governance pages do not list him, so this page says "reported."

Receipt: Anthropic, The Long-Term Benefit Trust · TIME100 Philanthropy 2026

The figure shows one bright circle at the top, labeled Tallinn, and a legend for the four kinds of line. Every circle can be opened for its filing.

Step two · the second source

The other check on the same round.

Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook, then Asana, then a foundation called Good Ventures with more than seven billion dollars in it. Its grantmaking arm was Open Philanthropy; in late 2025 it renamed itself Coefficient Giving. He co-led the same Series A. Two of the three sources on this page were the lead investors in the company at the center of the story, before it had a product.

Private foundationA tax-exempt entity funded by one family or one company. Its filings list every grant over a threshold, so its money can be followed. Good Ventures is one; its tax ID is 46-1008520.

Receipt: ProPublica, Good Ventures 990-PF · Coefficient Technical AI Safety RFP

A second bright circle appears to the right, labeled Moskovitz.

Step three · the third source

The company. And the ring around it.

Anthropic is the third source, because it will write its own checks in Part five. Around it sits a dotted ring: the trust, a body of a few people with no financial stake, designed to elect a majority of the board so the company stays on mission. Watch who has sat inside that ring.

Long-Term Benefit TrustAnthropic's independent trust. As of April 2026 its appointees are a majority of the board. Its trustees are chosen by the existing trustees, in consultation with the company.

Receipt: Anthropic, The Long-Term Benefit Trust · Anthropic, April 14, 2026

A third bright circle appears at the far right, labeled Anthropic, with a dotted red ring around it. Three small red dots on the ring slide off one at a time, labeled RAND, METR, and C-suite. Two dim gold lines connect Tallinn and Moskovitz to Anthropic, labeled Series A.

Step four · the first pipe

A fund with a formula, and a clause that undoes the formula.

Tallinn's money leaves through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, a pipe: it takes applications, runs them through a process it calls the S-Process, and publishes a table of who got what. The process is designed, in its own words, to "favor funding things that at least one Recommender is excited to fund, rather than things that every Recommender is excited to fund."

RecommenderOne of roughly twelve people per round who assign value to each application. Some are named; some are anonymous. The Funder can also make grants the process did not endorse.

Receipt: SFF-2025 S-Process Recommendations

A dotted gold circle appears below Tallinn, labeled SFF. A vertical trunk runs down from it, and eleven recipient names branch off it in a column, each with an empty circle. A scale at the left shows what $100K and $1M look like.

Step five · the grant tables, 2019 to 2025

Scroll to see the grants accumulate.

Every year the fund publishes its table. The year is on the figure; the circles are the recipients; the circle's radius is its money. As you scroll, the year advances from 2019 to 2025 and the circles grow to the size the fund gave them. The amounts appear to the right of the trunk. Watch the top three, and MIRI.

RecipientAn organization that draws from a pipe. Every recipient on this page reappears later in a different role: as amplifier, referee, journalist, forecaster, or analyst. Their circles are sized from the fund's own 2024 and 2025 tables.

Receipt: SFF-2024 · SFF-2025 · SFF annual announcements

A large year counter at the right advances with your scroll. Each branch from the trunk lights as its recipient receives money, and the circles grow, with the amount printed beside each. By 2025 the largest are MIRI, AI Futures Project, and AI Policy Institute.

Step six · who sat in the room

The largest grant went to the organization whose leaders helped decide.

Rememberthe Recommender from step four. Nine of the twelve in 2025 are named.

Two of the named Recommenders on the 2025 Main Track were Malo Bourgon and Nate Soares. Bourgon is the CEO of MIRI; Soares is its President and a board member. MIRI received $1.607 million plus a matching pledge of $1.392 million, the largest award in the round. The fund discloses this; it is not hidden. It is the design.

Matching pledgeMoney the fund promises to give only if the recipient raises outside money at a stated ratio. MIRI's December 2025 fundraiser raised $1.6 million, and the fund matched it.

Receipt: MIRI, October 2023 · SFF-2025, Recommenders list

Two small dots appear inside the SFF circle, labeled Bourgon and Soares, and the line from SFF to MIRI brightens.

Step seven · the second pipe

The same man's institute, paying churches for statements.

The Future of Life Institute, which Tallinn co-founded, co-funded the fund's 2023 rounds and is a second pipe. It runs a full-time religions program with a "Religions lead" and a "U.S. Faith Liaison." Its own grants page lists sixteen religious recipients in one program alone, $1.56 million across Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu organizations, each required to name "red lines" on AI as a condition of the grant. Effort.news, which audited FLI's religious giving across programs, put the total at $3.3 million and found that most recipients did not disclose the funding on their own project pages.

Fiscal sponsorA nonprofit that receives a grant on behalf of a project that has no legal entity of its own. Several recipients on this page are reached through one: The Hack Foundation, Ashgro, Rethink Priorities, Players Philanthropy Fund, March On.

Receipt: FLI, RFP on religious projects, recipients list · Effort.news · SFF-2023-H2

A dotted gold circle appears beside SFF, labeled FLI, with a line from Tallinn and a line to SFF marked co-funder 2023. Its label reads $3.3M to faith orgs.

Step eight · the third pipe

Two hundred million dollars, opened the week of the clock.

RememberMoskovitz from step two. His pipe is Coefficient Giving.

Coefficient opened a program called Project Tailwind in September 2026: $200 million for people to found new AI safety organizations, with grants from $200,000 to $50 million "and beyond," deadline October 2. Coefficient's own page says total philanthropy for AI catastrophic risk is "probably under $200 million a year." One program doubled the field, the same week the researcher resigned. The man who co-founded this pipe and ran it until 2023, Holden Karnofsky, is married to Anthropic's president and joined Anthropic in January 2025 to work on its Responsible Scaling Policy.

RegrantorA fund that receives money from a larger fund to give away. The Long-Term Future Fund is one; about half its money comes from Coefficient. Coefficient's Launchpad Funds put $50 million into new regrantors alongside Tailwind.

Receipt: Coefficient Giving, Project Tailwind · Fortune, Feb 13, 2025

A dotted gold circle appears below Moskovitz, labeled Coefficient, with a line from Moskovitz, and its label reads $200M. A cream line draws from Coefficient to the Anthropic ring, labeled Karnofsky, 2025.

Step nine · where the dot starts

Two universities, one movement.

Jacob Coxon read mathematics at Cambridge and medalled twice at the International Mathematical Olympiad. In 2020 and 2021 he co-authored a Bayesian analysis of tuberculous meningitis with Oxford tropical medicine researchers; it is archived at Oxford. Cambridge is where Tallinn co-founded the existential-risk centre. Oxford is where the Future of Humanity Institute was. He was formed inside the movement's two academic homes, not recruited from outside them.

Receipt: eLife 61722 · Oxford Research Archive

A small cream dot appears at the bottom left, labeled Coxon, beside a circle labeled Cambridge · Oxford.

Step ten · the first line it touches

A college of political technology, funded as an EA hub.

In 2021 Coxon joined the fellowship at Newspeak House, which calls itself the London College of Political Technology. His listing: "Applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets." In August 2023 the EA Infrastructure Fund gave Newspeak House $31,887.76 for "one year of funding to support Newspeak House as an EA community hub." A DeepMind researcher commented that he was "pretty surprised" because Newspeak did not seem to be trying to be one.

Political technologyNewspeak House's own term for what it teaches. Its founder, Ed Saperia, is a director of Campaign Lab Ltd, a political data-science company with its registered correspondence address at Newspeak House.

Receipt: EAIF March 2024 payout report · Newspeak House fellowship page

The Coxon dot slides right to a circle labeled Newspeak House. A dim gold line draws from Coefficient to Newspeak House, labeled EAIF $31,888.

Step eleven · the second line

A scholarship from the second source.

RememberMoskovitz from step two and the regrantor from step eight.

According to Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center, Coxon received a $20,159 scholarship from Good Ventures in 2022. Good Ventures' own page confirms it ran a program of that kind that year, $2.23 million in scholarships for "promising and altruistically minded students" at US and UK institutions, under its work "growing the community of people working to improve the long-run future." The recipient-level record is no longer public, so the specific figure rests on Thayer. Small money either way. It puts the second source on the dot's path two years before he joined either lab.

Receipt: Good Ventures, 2022 scholarships · OfficeChai, citing Thayer · Kingy.ai audit

A second dim gold line draws from Coefficient to the Coxon dot, labeled $20,159.

Step twelve · three years, one lab

His co-authors publish with the man who made the same move in 2024.

From 2023 to July 2026 Coxon was on OpenAI's technical staff, in Leo Gao's interpretability group, credited on the GPT-4o system card. His November 2025 paper lists Gao, Bowen Baker, and Dan Mossing as co-authors. All three have published with Jan Leike, who resigned from OpenAI in May 2024 over safety, criticized it publicly, and joined Anthropic within days to lead a new alignment team. The paper also cites Samuel Marks, who appears in step twenty-two.

Employment lineA cream line on this page. Coxon's "three years at both OpenAI and Anthropic" is almost entirely OpenAI; the Anthropic portion is the next step.

Receipt: arXiv 2511.13653 · Leike publications · TechCrunch, May 2024

The Coxon dot slides right to a circle labeled OpenAI. A faint dotted cream line draws from OpenAI up to Anthropic, labeled Leike, 2024.

Step thirteen · into the ring

Six weeks. "No, not yet."

In July 2026 Coxon left OpenAI and joined Anthropic. Around six weeks later he resigned. When WIRED asked whether Anthropic was cutting corners, he said "No, not yet." His only concrete evidence for the resignation was a July incident at his former employer. His X account had been created in January with no posts and verified in August, still with none.

Receipt: TIME · Axios

The Coxon dot travels up the cream line from OpenAI and settles inside the Anthropic ring.

Step fourteen · 2021, in gray

The Journal did not receive a whistleblower. It built one.

In December 2020 a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jeff Horwitz met a Facebook product manager named Frances Haugen. He gave her a code name and worked with her for ten months. When the Facebook Files ran, a Santa Barbara firm called Bryson Gillette managed her public rollout: 60 Minutes, Senate testimony, a consortium of 160 outlets. Haugen's memoir calls Horwitz "my rock." The firm won an industry award for the work.

ConsortiumA group of newsrooms given the same documents on the same schedule so the story lands everywhere at once. Bryson Gillette's Emily Schwartz built this one and later gave a conference talk titled "So You're Going to Blow the Whistle? Communications Dos and Don'ts for Whistleblowers."

Receipt: Slate, Oct 2021 · USENIX Enigma 2023 · Bryson Gillette, Nov 2021

A gray dotted circle appears at the bottom right, labeled Haugen 2021. Three gray dotted lines draw from it: to a circle labeled WSJ on the right edge, to a circle labeled Bryson Gillette, and to a circle labeled Senate. The ghost shape stays on the figure from here on.

Step fifteen · the template, in theaters

Opens October 9. The reporter is a credited writer.

Aaron Sorkin's film about Haugen and Horwitz is called The Social Reckoning. Its synopsis: a young engineer "enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter." Horwitz has a writing credit. The trailer released on August 26, the afternoon Meta settled with 51 states for $17.1 billion. The engineer-and-the-Journal-reporter is being made into a hero story four and a half weeks after the clock.

Receipt: Box Office Mojo credits · Deadline, Aug 2026

The gray network stays. A small label appears beside WSJ: Oct 9, on screen.

Step sixteen · the fourth pipe

Forty million dollars into a nonprofit that does not name its donors.

In February 2026 Anthropic gave $20 million to Public First Action, a 501(c)(4) founded three months earlier by two former congressmen, one from each party. In July it gave $20 million more. Public First Action has raised $100 million in total and will not say from whom. It feeds two super PACs, one for each party, and its stated priorities include export controls on AI chips.

501(c)(4)A "social welfare" nonprofit that may spend on politics and is not required to disclose its donors. The money that reaches candidates goes through affiliated committees that do file.

Receipt: Anthropic, Feb 12 · Anthropic, Jul 21

A dotted gold circle appears below Anthropic, labeled Public First Action, with a line from Anthropic labeled $40M. Below it, a smaller circle labeled J&D PAC, with a line labeled $12.7M.

Step seventeen · the firm, again

Every dollar through one vendor. The vendor from step fourteen.

Rememberthe gray circle labeled Bryson Gillette. It is about to light.

The Democratic PAC's sworn filing for June 2026 lists fifty-five pages of independent expenditures. Every one went through Bryson Gillette. Every one supported one candidate, Alex Bores, in one race, the NY-12 Democratic primary. Calendar-year total for Bores: $15,026,937.99. The firm that ran the Haugen rollout runs the political spending for the company the researcher will leave.

Independent expenditureMoney a committee spends supporting or opposing a candidate without coordinating with the campaign. It is itemized on Schedule E with the vendor, the amount, the date, and the candidate.

Receipt: FEC, C00928374 · Form 3X, July 2026

The gray Bryson Gillette circle turns solid cream. A dim gold line draws from J&D PAC to it, labeled $15M, and another from Bryson Gillette down to a circle labeled Bores · NY-12.

Step eighteen · June 23

Four points short.

Micah Lasher, endorsed by the retiring incumbent and the governor and backed by a Bloomberg super PAC, won with 39 percent. Bores took 35. A rival AI super PAC funded by OpenAI's president and Andreessen Horowitz had named Bores its first target the previous August. Fifteen million dollars through the Haugen firm produced a four-point loss. The channel failed.

Receipt: Ballotpedia · NY1

The network dims. Two bars rise in the center: Lasher to 39 percent in gold, Bores to 35 percent in gray. A red line of text appears: the electoral channel, failed.

Step nineteen · September 3

The bill was on the table five days early.

On Wednesday, September 3, Senator Sanders and Representative Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act: a permanent ban, a pause, a new cabinet agency, twenty-year sentences. The same day OpenAI released its newest model. The legislative vehicle was loaded before anyone resigned.

Receipt: Axios, Sept 3

A dotted circle appears on the right edge, labeled Sanders, where the gray Senate circle was.

Step twenty · September 8, evening

The dot leaves the ring.

Rememberthe dot from step thirteen, inside the ring for six weeks.

The Journal's reporter on this story is Amrith Ramkumar, a Washington tech-policy correspondent who has covered Anthropic all year: the $40 million to Public First Action, the White House shutdown of its Mythos model, its security staff flying to Washington. At 3:13 PM his colleague published "What to Know About Anthropic's Planned IPO." At 7:46 PM Ramkumar published the exclusive. At 8:04 PM Coxon posted.

Receipt: Ramkumar byline archive · The post

The Coxon dot moves out of the ring to the center of the figure and begins to pulse. A cream line draws from the WSJ circle to it.

Step twenty-one · 7:40 to 8:35 PM

The amplifiers are the grantees.

Rememberthe circles you grew in step five. Watch which ones light, and in what order.

The clock on the figure runs from 7:40 to 8:35 PM as you scroll. At 7:46 the Journal. At 8:04 the post. At 8:10, Nathan Calvin, general counsel of Encode AI. At 8:14, Daniel Kokotajlo, who runs the AI Futures Project. At 8:19, Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, whose sister organization is AIPI. At 8:31, a program officer at Coefficient Giving who rarely posts. Each bright line lands on a circle you funded. Each time one lights, the gold line behind it, from the pipe to the circle, lights too.

AmplifierA recipient whose staff quote-posted the resignation within fifteen minutes. The three organizations received $4.2 million from the first source in 2025. The fourth is on the second source's staff.

Receipt: OfficeChai, citing Thayer · Benzinga, Sacks on All-In

A clock at the bottom advances with your scroll. As it passes each minute mark, a bright gold line draws from a recipient circle to the pulsing Coxon dot, and the dim gold line from the pipe to that recipient brightens for a moment. By 8:31 four bright lines converge on the dot.

Step twenty-two · September 9

From inside the ring. And no statement.

The next morning Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, posted: "Jacob is correct here; we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is greater than ten percent within the next decade." Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight, reposted it. The company issued nothing. Kokotajlo appeared on Joe Rogan the same day. Sanders wrote "Mr. Coxon is right." Project Tailwind opened. The FEC sent the PAC its notice.

ValidationA bright line from inside the ring to the dot. A company preparing a two-trillion-dollar listing, with Covington & Burling on retainer, let its safety lead put a ten-percent extinction figure on the record and did not correct it.

Receipt: TNW · NBC, Sept 10

Two bright lines draw from inside the Anthropic ring to the Coxon dot, labeled Hubinger and Marks. Above Anthropic, red text: no statement. Beside AI Futures Project, small gold text: Rogan, Sept 9. The Sanders circle turns bright. The Coefficient circle grows.

Step twenty-three · the movie version

One conscience, one post, four steps.

That is the story you heard: a young researcher sees the danger, resigns on principle, the world listens, and laws follow. It is a real story; the template in step fourteen is that story. What lands on it here is not a verdict. It is a map.

Receipt: this page, steps four through twenty-one

Four panels appear: sees the danger, resigns, the world listens, laws follow. A red stamp lands across them reading see part two, with a tiny copy of the network inside it.

Step twenty-four · September 12 and 13

The essay. Then the researcher says: let the labs regulate themselves.

On Saturday, September 12, Anthropic's CEO published an essay: we must pace the frontier. OpenAI's CEO and Musk agreed within hours. Its last third calls for chip export controls against China and the criminalization of model copying. On Sunday, Coxon told Meet the Press: "My personal opinion would be to insist and allow that the current labs regulate themselves. I do think that the people running the labs, especially their recent communications, are completely genuine." Five days after "gambling with our lives," the whistleblower delivered the incumbents' ask.

Receipt: NBC, Meet the Press, Sept 13 · Forbes, Sept 13

A speech bubble beside the Coxon dot reads gambling with our lives, then flips to let the labs regulate themselves.

Step twenty-five · September 14

The regulated are designing the regulator.

Rememberthe referee from step five, and the trustees who left the ring in step three.

The Washington Post: leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google "have been discussing the creation of a new safety body." OpenAI's head of global affairs called for "independent verification." METR, the organization proposed to do it, is a recipient from step five; its founder sat inside the ring until 2024; two of the researchers who resigned this week now work there. That is capture, run in reverse: the regulator built before it exists, then pre-staffed.

Regulatory captureWhen an industry shapes the body meant to oversee it. The classic version captures an agency that already exists. This version builds the demand, writes the content, funds the candidates, and staffs the referee, in that order.

Receipt: Washington Post, Sept 14

A dotted circle appears at the bottom right, labeled safety body, with a dotted red line from Anthropic to it. A dim gold line draws from METR toward it.

Step twenty-six · the empty circle

Nobody had to pick up the phone.

There is no internal email on this page. No leaked message. No proof that any one person told any other person what to do on the evening of September 8. That is not the gap in the argument; it is the finding. A network in which every node draws from the same three sources does not need a phone call. The people inside it experience consensus. The ledger shows a budget.

The danger is not the parrot waking up. The danger is who holds the report card, and whether anyone checked the room.

Receipt: none. That is the point.

The full network, every line lit, every circle at its 2025 size. In the exact center, a dotted gold circle with nothing in it, labeled who picked up the phone.