How the Collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's Crypto Empire Disrupted A.I.

Mr. Bankman-Fried and his colleagues spent more than $530 million fighting what they saw as the dangers of artificial intelligence. Now those efforts are being shaken.

SAN FRANCISCO - In April, a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab called Anthropic raised $580 million for research involving " A.I. security."

Few people in Silicon Valley had heard of the year-long lab, which builds A.I. language-generating systems. But the amount of money pledged to the small company dwarfed what venture capitalists were pouring into other A.I. start-ups, including those staffed with some of the most experienced researchers in the field.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The funding round was led by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that filed for bankruptcy last month. After FTX's sudden collapse, a leaked balance sheet showed Mr. Bankman-Fried and his colleagues pumped at least $500 million into Anthropic.

Their investment was part of an and a pipe dream effort to explore and mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence, which many in Mr. Bankman-Fried's entourage believe could eventually destroy the world and harm humanity. Over the past two years, the 30-year-old entrepreneur and his colleagues at FTX have funneled more than $530 million — in grants or investments — into more than 70 AI-related companies, university labs, think tanks, independent projects and individual researchers to address concerns about the technology, according to a New York Times tally.

Now some of these organizations and people don't know not if they can keep spending that money, said four people close to the A.I. efforts that were not authorized to speak publicly. They said they feared Mr Bankman-Fried's fall would cast doubt on their research and undermine their reputation. And some of the A.I. startups and organizations could eventually find themselves embroiled in FTX's bankruptcy proceedings, with their grants potentially recouped in court, they said. world are unexpected fallout from FTX's disintegration, showing how far the ripple effects of the crypto exchange's collapse and Mr. Bankman-Fried's vaporized fortune have traveled.

ImageSam Bankman-Fried at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. His attempts to influence artificial intelligence are part of a philanthropic philosophy known as effective altruism. surprised by the connection between these two emerging areas of technology,” said Andrew Burt, an attorney and visiting scholar at Yale Law School who specializes in the risks of artificial intelligence, about A.I. and crypto. "But beneath the surface there are direct links between the two."

Mr. Bankman-Fried, which is the subject of investigations into the collapse of FTX and which