AI companies don't bribe reporters. They fund fellowships.
One Facebook fortune paid for a board seat at OpenAI, a stake in Anthropic, and the salaries of AI reporters at major newsrooms. Here is how the money moves.
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, it has passed through enough hands that nobody ever has to say anything out loud.
I've spent time in executive rooms. I know how these arrangements work. There is rarely a document that says "we give you X, you give us Y." There are understandings. Some of them you can prove from public records, and that is what this piece does. I walked through it on video first. This is the written version with the sources attached, plus a map you can click through yourself.
- Series A, 2021
- $30M, 2017
- $100M+ buyout
- $4.7M+
Tap any name to trace its money, or step through the whole trail.
Start with the obvious stuff
Before we get to the foundation money, the easy layer. A lot of Silicon Valley's tech media is paid for by the companies it covers, and it doesn't really hide that. Tech people tend not to notice, because it looks like content.
Andreessen Horowitz is invested in a huge share of the biggest companies in San Francisco, and by its own description it is now a media company as much as a venture firm. Podcasts five days a week. It also openly finances a show aimed at Gen Z called Monitor the Situation. The account has around half a million followers. When I looked at its recent posts, they were pulling around a hundred likes and a dozen comments. I get that engagement on an account with four thousand followers. Half a million followers and a hundred likes tells you who is actually watching: the venture capital group chat, plus a lot of accounts that aren't people. The audience isn't the point. Legitimacy is the point, so the segments get picked up and portfolio companies get friendly airtime.
TBPN is the same idea done better. Its sponsor was Ramp, and roughly every startup in San Francisco runs its spending through Ramp. You can't do hard reporting on Ramp's customers while Ramp pays for the show. Then OpenAI bought TBPN. The price was reported in the low hundreds of millions, for a show that did about $5M in ad revenue the year before. The generous version is that it was on pace for $30M this year. Even granting that, nobody pays that multiple for a talk show because of its ad business, and OpenAI shut the ads off after the deal. You buy a show like that for what it says and who it has on.
Molly O'Shea's show, Sourcery, is presented by Brex. I like Molly. I think she's a genuinely good interviewer, which is exactly why this bugs me. When the scene's corporate card sponsors the show, the founder interviews come with edges on them, and the hard question doesn't get asked.
None of that is secret. It's baby's first conspiracy theory. The part that matters is the next layer, where the money moves through philanthropy.
Follow the fortune
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook, left in 2008 to co-found Asana, and is worth about $10 billion. He and his wife Cari Tuna give their money away through a foundation that was, until recently, called Open Philanthropy.
My read, and it is a read: when you have ten billion dollars, money stops being the thing you want. You're post-economic. What's left to buy is influence. That isn't a crime. It is a motive, and motives are where I start.
Open Philanthropy took a run of critical stories from Politico, brought in experienced political communications staff, and renamed itself Coefficient Giving. New name, same money. Semafor noted in the same story that Coefficient is one of the funders behind something called the Tarbell Center. Hold onto that.
The board seat and the marriage
In 2017, Open Philanthropy gave OpenAI $30 million, and Open Phil's co-founder Holden Karnofsky took a seat on OpenAI's board. There was no contract saying $30 million buys a board seat. There doesn't need to be. That's how favors work at that altitude.
Notice who took the seat. Not Moskovitz. Robert Greene has a law in The 48 Laws of Power about keeping your hands clean: let other people do the visible work so your own involvement stays out of sight. Sending your co-founder instead of sitting there yourself is that law in practice.
Now the part that sounds made up. Karnofsky is married to Daniela Amodei, the president and co-founder of Anthropic, OpenAI's main competitor. He left OpenAI's board in 2021. Anthropic later hired him onto its technical staff without announcing it. A former OpenAI board member joining its biggest rival would normally be a press release. This one surfaced on LinkedIn.
The money connects too. Anthropic's $124 million Series A in 2021 was led by Jaan Tallinn, with Moskovitz in the round. Tallinn also sits on the board of the Future of Life Institute, which says its mission is making sure AI benefits all of us. It's worth asking who "us" is.
So: one fortune behind both labs that are supposedly racing each other. A board seat at one, a marriage and a paycheck at the other. It's the same handful of people.
Where it lands: the newsroom
The fair objection is that rich people being tangled up with AI labs doesn't touch what you read in the news. This is where it does.
The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism pays journalists to cover AI. That isn't an accusation. It's the model. Coefficient Giving has given Tarbell more than $4.7 million, according to Coefficient's own grants database. Tarbell's other funders include the Future of Life Institute, the EA Infrastructure Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which is Tallinn again. (Correction: in the video I said Coefficient gave "a million plus." The real number is several times that.)
Tarbell fellows have been placed at Time, Bloomberg, NBC News, The Verge, The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times, at $60,000 to $110,000 a year. Tarbell says it funds reporting that helps society deal with increasingly capable AI, whether that means raising awareness of an overlooked harm or pushing policy change. Which harms, and which policy? The ones its funders care about.
Disclosure is spotty. Semafor reported that NBC News added a disclosure to a story about OpenAI only after OpenAI complained about the reporter's Tarbell funding. Tarbell's executive director told Semafor the group "never directs coverage, assignments, or angles." I believe nobody hands these reporters a script. They don't need one.
I don't think most of these fellows are sitting in a smoky back room. Most of them are young, underpaid, and working in an industry that AI slop is actively eating. Then someone offers a salary to cover exactly the beat you wanted, paid for by people with a very specific view of what AI is and what should be done about it. You know which stories keep the fellowship coming. The incentive does the editing.
So the money that built the AI labs pays the salaries of people assigned to cover the AI labs. They funded the labs, took the board seats, funded the foundations, and paid for the fellowships. When that wasn't enough, OpenAI bought a media company outright.
How this work gets paid for
I'd be a hypocrite not to answer the same question about myself. The Dr. J Show and my media company, Meridian Strategic Systems, are funded two ways: sponsors, clearly disclosed as sponsors, and direct support from the people who watch and read. I have not taken, and will not take, shadow money to change what I say. If you want reporting like this that nobody upstream is paying for, support it on Patreon or get the letter below.
- Dr. J