Recently, when reviewing the history of AI investments, I discovered a story so strange it's hard to believe. In 2022, before ChatGPT existed, the AI market had not yet heated up, a cryptocurrency scammer signed a check for $500 million to Anthropic. Today, this AI company is valued at over $380 billion. If everything were legal, that investment would be worth more than $30 billion—an over 60-fold profit. This story begins with a community called Effective Altruism, where a group of people in San Francisco live together, sharing the same philosophy: charity must be based on calculation, each dollar should be directed to maximize benefits. Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, lives with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, one of the most influential fund allocators in this movement. Paul Christiano, an AI alignment researcher, also lives in that house. Karnofsky later married Daniela, Dario's sister, and both have lived with Dario. In January 2025, Karnofsky quietly joined Anthropic as a technical staff member. This is a very discreet social network. Amanda Askell, an early employee of Anthropic, is a former wife of William MacAskill, the initiator of the EA movement. The Long-Term Benefits Fund, the most important governing body of Anthropic, has three of its four members from within the EA system. The three largest investors in EA history—Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, and Sam Bankman-Fried—are all early investors in Anthropic. That is the real path through which SBF found Anthropic, not through brilliant investment vision, but simply through capital flowing within the community. SBF pursues a more extreme branch of EA called earning to give—making money and then donating. He left Jane Street to enter cryptocurrency, publicly stating that his goal was not personal accumulation but altruism—earning money and then investing in areas with the greatest positive impact. Anthropic's proposition, developing powerful AI safely, is almost the standard solution of EA for the existential risk posed by AI. In May 2021, Jaan Tallinn led Series A with $124 million, with Moskovitz participating. In April 2022, SBF took over and led Series B, signing a check for $500 million, accounting for 86% of the total $580 million raised. The investors included Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda, Nishad Singh, CTO of FTX, and Jane Street, SBF's former company. Dario Amodei is not stupid. He later admitted that he recognized enough warning signals from SBF, so he made a smart decision: accept the money but isolate SBF from the board, giving him non-voting shares only. Dario then said SBF was more extreme and worse than he had imagined. But the question remains: if the warning signals were so many that isolation was necessary, why did they still accept? The answer lies in the operational logic of EA. The purity of the source of funds has never been the top priority. What matters is effectiveness—does it help you do more? The entire story of SBF's wealth is built on this: making money is a means, doing good is the goal, so the way to make money may not be overly complicated, as long as the final product of good is large enough. This logic was pushed to the criminal extreme by SBF, but at the time he invested in Anthropic, it still appeared as a philosophical choice of capital-seeking but not illegal. Then, in November 2022, everything collapsed. CoinDesk exposed Alameda's balance sheet, Zhao Changpeng announced the sale of FTT, a wave of withdrawals hit FTX, and the empire crumbled in nine days. SBF was arrested, extradited, and prosecuted. In March 2024, the judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The 8% stake in Anthropic, along with all other assets, was frozen during bankruptcy liquidation. SBF's defense lawyer tried to use the investment in Anthropic as evidence of his vision. Prosecutor Damian Williams responded firmly: whether these investments are profitable or not has nothing to do with fraud. You stole money from others to invest; even if profitable, it’s still theft. The court accepted the prosecution's view, and the Anthropic shares were excluded from the trial. Then came the liquidation auction. In March 2024, it was valued at $884 million. Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund, invested $500 million—exactly the same amount SBF had spent. Jane Street, SBF's former company, also paid to buy back shares purchased with illicit funds. The total recoveries of $1.34 billion were transferred into the FTX creditor compensation fund, helping users recover their deposits. But what if the liquidation team didn't sell? By February 2026, Anthropic completed its G funding round with a $30 billion valuation, reaching a $380 billion valuation. Ignoring dilution, the 8% stake theoretically increased from $1.34 billion to over $30 billion. That discrepancy is why this story remains discussed to this day. The biggest regret in the entire FTX collapse. Now, Anthropic is trying to distance itself from the EA movement. The seven co-founders have all pledged to donate 80% of their personal assets; at current valuation, this pledge is worth about $38 billion. Nearly 30 Anthropic employees registered for the EA conference, twice the total number of employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta combined. But Daniela Amodei told Wired: I am not an EA expert, I don't agree with that term, my impression is that it’s a bit outdated. The stance of using EA's money, using EA's people, but not recognizing it as EA, has become more understandable after the SBF incident. The collapse of FTX has brought EA's reputation to its lowest point. Anthropic needs to dissociate from this label. But the truth is there: the founding logic of Anthropic stems from EA's argument about AI existential risk, with early-stage capital almost entirely from the EA network, and governance structure controlled by those within the EA system. Today, Sam Bankman-Fried is in federal prison. He could be released as early as 2049, at age 57. During his detention, the AI company he invested in with illicit funds has been valued at over $380 billion, engaging in a global AI showdown with the Pentagon, with its founder becoming a regular guest of the New York Times and Congress. If everything were legal, SBF's $500 million would be enough to make him one of the most profitable venture investors. Both SBF and Anthropic share the same core operating principle: to achieve great altruistic benefits, unconventional methods and risks can be accepted. SBF pushes this logic beyond criminal boundaries, while Anthropic operates on the safer side of the line, but its core proposition—building the strongest AI to ensure safety—is a grand gamble. They grew on the same land. Dario and SBF once attended the same parties, believed in the same philosophy, living at different nodes in the same social network. One aiming for a $380 billion AI empire, the other in federal prison. The check for $500 million connecting them remains the strangest chapter in Anthropic's history.