AI companies don't bribe journalists directly. That would be too obvious, and every reporter would have a clean line back to the cash. What actually happens is smarter and worse. A fortune funds a foundation, the foundation funds a nonprofit, the nonprofit funds a fellowship, and the fellowship pays a reporter who covers AI at NBC or Bloomberg or the LA Times. By the time the money lands, nobody ever has to say anything out loud.
I mapped the whole thing. Click through the interactive version here.
One fortune, both labs
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook and is worth about $10 billion. He and his wife Cari Tuna give it away through a foundation that used to be called Open Philanthropy. After a run of critical Politico stories, it brought in political communications staff and renamed itself Coefficient Giving. New name, same money.
In 2017 that foundation gave OpenAI $30 million, and its co-founder Holden Karnofsky took a seat on OpenAI's board. No contract said the money bought the seat. It didn't need to.
Karnofsky is married to Daniela Amodei, the president of Anthropic, OpenAI's main rival. Anthropic later hired him onto its technical staff without announcing it. And Moskovitz put money into Anthropic's $124 million Series A. One fortune behind both labs that are supposedly racing each other.
Where it lands
Coefficient Giving has given the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism more than $4.7 million, per its own grants database. Tarbell pays reporters $60,000 to $110,000 a year to cover AI at outlets including Time, Bloomberg, NBC News, The Verge, The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. NBC added a disclosure to one OpenAI story only after OpenAI complained, Semafor reported.
Tarbell says it never directs coverage. I believe nobody hands these reporters a script. They don't need one. Most of them are young, underpaid, and working in an industry AI slop is eating alive. When a salary shows up to cover exactly the beat you wanted, you know which stories keep it coming. The incentive does the editing.
Then there's the layer nobody hides. OpenAI bought the tech show TBPN for what was reported as the low hundreds of millions. Andreessen Horowitz finances its own show, Monitor the Situation. Brex presents Sourcery. When the scene's investors and bankers pay for the coverage, the hard question doesn't get asked.
A correction from the video: I said Coefficient gave Tarbell "a million plus." The real number is several times that.
This letter isn't paid for by anyone upstream. Sponsors on the show are always disclosed, and I have never taken shadow money to change what I say. If you want more of this, support it on Patreon or forward this to someone who reads AI news.
- Dr. J