Kevin Bass's Anthropic-METR Funding Claim: What the Audit Found

A new audit of Kevin Bass’s viral allegations about Anthropic and the AI evaluator METR finds that the two links central to his funding theory remain unresolved: where Dustin Moskovitz’s donated Anthropic stake sits, and whether money from it reaches METR. That does not erase METR’s disclosed reliance on free compute from frontier labs it evaluates, or the connections among organizations in the AI-safety funding ecosystem. But it means the claim that Anthropic controls METR through funding funnels is not established by the public records cited.

Bass published a thread and GitHub repository on September 14 alleging that Moskovitz-linked funding moves through philanthropic intermediaries to organizations around METR, creating incentives to promote AI-safety policies favorable to Anthropic. He described the work as an audit of Anthropic’s finances and called for a congressional investigation. No filed investigation, regulatory action, or independently verified financial finding accompanied the social-media post.

The repository draws on IRS filings, donor-advised-fund records, and SEC filings. Yet it also marks its own crucial gaps: it does not identify the location of Moskovitz’s donated Anthropic stock or establish a route from that stock to METR. The audit says Bass found no direct National Philanthropic Trust grants to METR or its parent organization, ARC, and that an originally reported direct Coefficient-to-METR grant is disputed.

One filing cited in the audit records a $1,395,695,354 non-cash gift of publicly traded securities to Good Ventures from the Dustin A. Moskovitz Remainder Interest Trust. The filing does not identify those securities as private Anthropic stock. Coefficient Giving chief executive Alexander Berger also said Open Philanthropy did not invest in Anthropic and that Moskovitz donated his Anthropic stake somewhere other than Coefficient.

METR’s August funding update said it had raised commitments of around $71 million over six months. It named the Audacious Project, Pew Charitable Trusts, Schmidt Sciences, the Packard and Sijbrandij foundations, named individuals, and others; the post did not list Open Philanthropy, Coefficient Giving, or Good Ventures. METR said it does not accept funding from frontier AI companies or donations made by or at the direction of their staff.

That named list is not a complete map of every financial relationship METR may have had. But it is material evidence against a claim of direct, identified funding from the organizations Bass named. Separately, Coefficient’s 2025 donor-suggestions post recommended METR to individual donors while stating that METR was not a Coefficient grantee.

The narrower independence questions still standing

• METR says frontier AI companies provide significant free tokens for its evaluations, research, and engineering.
• The audit reports that METR has no published formal conflict-of-interest policy, despite METR’s own self-assessment identifying that gap.
• The audit says METR disclosed that OpenAI’s legal team retained report-review rights under an NDA for its GPT-5 evaluation.

The viral allegation reaches further than the evidence now supports. But the audit leaves a more concrete governance problem: an evaluator can be financially separate from the companies it examines while still relying on those companies for a material input to do its work. METR discloses that arrangement. Whether disclosure, a formal conflict policy, and safeguards around lab access are enough to preserve public confidence remains unresolved.