THROUGHOUT MY TWO decades in Silicon Valley, I have seen effective altruism (EA)—a movement consisting of an overwhelmingly white male group based largely out of Oxford University and Silicon Valley—gain alarming levels of influence.

EA is currently being scrutinized due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scandal, but less has been written about how the ideology is now driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of “AI safety.”