X user Kevin Bass said he audited Anthropic's finances and found what he described as alarming results, prompting him to call on Congress to investigate. According to ChainCatcher, Bass argued that Anthropic has built a regulatory-capture system that cannot be shut down and said its structure creates incentives that make self-termination impossible.
Bass said the cycle begins with METR, which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed as a third-party evaluator of model risk. He claimed METR is financially dependent on Anthropic's success, pointing to more than $700 million in Anthropic stock growth and saying the stock was placed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz into Good Ventures Foundation, which he described as a dominant funder across the Anthropic ecosystem.
Bass said the stock was worth $500 million earlier last year and more than $770 million about 16 months later, and argued METR could not afford to disrupt that growth. He also said the same funding source supports groups promoting AI doom, including the Tarbell Center, which has published in The Verge, Science, and the Los Angeles Times. Bass said METR and similar groups are not independent of Anthropic and cannot provide an independent assessment.