Sam Bankman-Fried, the effective altruist who wasn’t
Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. His punishment comes despite his lawyers’ and his family’s attempts to argue that charitable good works, good intentions and a commitment to effective altruism should justify a shorter term. But Bankman-Fried doesn’t represent the ideas of effective altruism or the movement of people who support them.
In the early days of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, some people involved in effective altruism naively elevated him. We wanted to believe in the possibility that he was someone with immense resources who recognized the immense positive impact he could have in the world by managing those resources well. Many of us took Bankman-Fried at his word, but that has since proved to be worth very little.
We know better than to believe him now. We have long recognized the importance of truth and integrity. Bankman-Fried did not live by these values when he abused the trust placed in him by customers, investors, colleagues and the public.
Leading effective altruism organizations have also taken FTX’s downfall as an opportunity for reflection and institutional reform. My organization, the Centre for Effective
Altruism, hired an independent law firm to conduct an internal investigation into organizational ties with FTX, which found no evidence that anyone had prior knowledge of Bankman-Fried’s crimes. We have also reinvested in donor due diligence, updated our conflict-of-interest policies and reformed the governance of our organization, replacing leadership on the board and the staff.
Effective altruism existed before Bankman-Fried’s rise and remains a powerful force for good in the world after his fall. Our community has launched projects such as Giving What We Can — created in 2009, years before the founding of FTX — through which nearly 10,000 people in almost 100 countries have pledged to donate 10 percent of their income to effective charities for the rest of their lives. So far, people involved in this project have collectively donated $376 million to charity. Hundreds more have signed the lifetime pledge, and thousands made their first donations through the platform in 2023.
Their pledges support charities such as New Incentives, which provides cost-effective childhood vaccinations in Nigeria to protect against preventable diseases. In 2023 alone, New Incentives enrolled more than 1 million infants in the program. Another worthy beneficiary has been the Humane League, which supports better treatment of animals on factory farms. This organization has, among other things, helped advocate for a ban on some of the cruelest living conditions for pigs and chickens on California farms, and later successfully defended the ban in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Members of the effective altruism community have also foreseen significant problems. They began sounding the alarm about the possibility of a global pandemic years before COVID-19 came along, and they have been preparing even longer to address potentially transformative artificial intelligence. This is not a coincidence but rather a function of effective altruism’s open-minded, analytical approach to addressing overlooked, high-impact problems.
From the fall of FTX, we’ve learned the need to take this same approach toward ourselves, so we can better live up to our own values and principles. We live in a world of myriad problems and scarce resources. Effective altruism’s simple and resilient motivating idea is that we should use our limited resources to help others as much as possible. As Sam Bankman-Fried serves his sentence and his name fades from the headlines, the effective altruism community will continue to strive to make a positive impact on the world.