Brian Chau

Brian Chau represented Canada at the 2017 International Olympiad in Informatics, held in Tehran from July 28 to August 4, 2017, and won a gold medal, placing 17th of 304 contestants.¹ The University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics, whose staff led the Canadian team, reported that he was "just about to begin Grade 10 at Woburn Collegiate Institute in Toronto."² Alliance for the Future later described him as having "a background in Pure Mathematics," as "a former machine learning engineer" and as the author of the newsletter AI Pluralism, published on his Substack From the New World.³

Alliance for the Future

Chau founded and directed Alliance for the Future (AFTF), which Transformer called a "new AI think tank" in May 2024.⁴ AFTF describes itself as a Washington, D.C. nonprofit and "a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists, and policy experts who believe that artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better," formed "to oppose the escalating panic around AI." Its chairman is the computer scientist Perry Metzger; its board members are Jon Askonas, an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, and Guillaume Verdon, a founder of the Effective Accelerationism movement and founder and chief executive of the AI hardware company Extropic. The intellectual property lawyer Van Lindberg is its distinguished scholar and Neil Siefring, a former senior staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives, its senior fellow.³

In 2024 AFTF campaigned against California Senator Scott Wiener's AI bill, SB 1047. Transformer wrote that the campaign made "several false claims," among them that the bill would create an "unaccountable Frontier Model Division ... with police powers" able to "throw model developers in jail for the thoughtcrime of doing AI research," and that Wiener had rejected Chau's claim that the bill had been "fast tracked."⁴

On February 18, 2025, the firm Hilltop Advocacy of Rancho Mission Viejo, California, whose contact was Erin Siefring, registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act to lobby for AFTF, naming Neil Siefring as its lobbyist. Its six quarterly reports from the first quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026 each disclosed 20,000 dollars in income from AFTF and each listed a single issue: "Artificial intelligence and federal preemption."⁵

On March 5, 2025, Chau announced that he was stepping down as executive director. "Of the major regulatory challenges to AI we initially set out to face, almost all have been defeated," he wrote. "I'm tired of winning." He wrote that AFTF had "played an important role in defeating SB 1047, ensuring the National Defense Authorization Act did not threaten open source AI, advocating for the repeal of the Biden Executive Order on AI, advocating for the revision of OMB memoranda limiting public sector AI use, and charting out a strategy for AI diplomacy."⁶

Transformer investigation

On May 23, 2024, Transformer, the in-house publication of the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which stated in 2026 that "as of 2025, the majority of our funding originates with a single funder, Coefficient Giving,"⁷ published an article by Shakeel Hashim stating that Chau "has a history of expressing racist and sexist remarks." Hashim wrote that in a January 2024 post about AI deepfakes Chau had written "George Floyd was a deepfake," adding that George Floyd's "life is a rounding error when determining the fakeness of the video," and that in December 2023 he had joked about a "dark comedy version of Ratatouille where the Harvard president is a [sic] affirmative action hire black woman" who would "beg a white guy to feed her answers through a brain implant," when Harvard's president was Claudine Gay. Hashim quoted posts in which Chau called single women "leftover," said a "pretty large subset of [Gen Z] women are literally undateable," called diversity "often used as a euphemism for anti-white and anti-male bias," described the United States as a "Black Supremacist country," and wrote that "mentally ill people stole 'woman.'" Hashim wrote that Chau had hosted Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania on his podcast, calling Hanania "a brilliant analyst and policy thinker" and Yarvin's episode "among the best," and that Chau had referred to other journalists as "retards." Chau did not respond to Transformer's request for comment. The article noted that Chau had been featured in Politico and endorsed by Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute, adding that "there is no suggestion that Politico or Thierer knew about Chau's remarks," and that Verdon, on AFTF's board, "has said that he is indifferent to the idea of human extinction."⁴

Effort

Chau then founded Effort, published by Effort News, Inc., and serves as its founder and chief executive. Describing its origins, Chau wrote: "It all started when I was experimenting with using AI for financial auditing," and "I founded Effort on the principle that no diligence will be spared for an investigation." It states that it is "a subscriber-funded publication" whose subscribers "do not receive control over findings, subjects or publication decisions."⁸

On September 2, 2026, Effort published "How Effective Altruism Bought the Media," which stated that all six participants in a Guardian article on the forecast "AI 2027," including the reporter and the publisher, were paid by Coefficient Giving, Jaan Tallinn's Survival and Flourishing Fund or Effective Ventures; that Coefficient paid the reporter through the Tarbell Fellowship and had given the Guardian more than 3 million dollars; that "Coefficient pays the salaries of two dozen journalists at major news outlets through the Tarbell Fellowship program"; and that "58/100" of the Time 100 profiles were written by Tarbell-paid journalists.⁹ Chau promoted it on X the same day: "BREAKING: AI Doomers Are Buying Potemkin Articles."¹⁰

On September 19, 2026, Effort published "Effective Altruism is Buying Political Staff," written in the first person, which stated that an archived Open Philanthropy grant table "shows a concerted 'placement' strategy by Open Philanthropy to put their hand-picked employees in US and UK government offices," and that "multiple sources tell me they continue to employ this strategy within the Trump administration." It stated that Dustin Moskovitz had been the third-largest Democratic donor in 2020 and the second-largest in 2024, and Sam Bankman-Fried the third-largest in 2022; that "EA fellowships have placed over 50 staffers in Congress and the administrative branch," drawing on biographies from the Horizon Institute for Public Service, the Institute for Progress and the Foundation for American Innovation; and that several senior employees of the UK AI Safety Institute had previously been employed or funded by Moskovitz or Bankman-Fried. It quoted an unnamed senior staffer in a Republican senator's office on a Horizon fellow: "He went to Democrat policy meetings, and tried to hand Democrat policies to [the Senator he worked for]."¹¹