Seth Lloyd

Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a theorist of quantum computing. He met Jeffrey Epstein in 2004 at a dinner organized by the literary agent John Brockman, received a 60,000 dollar personal gift from him in 2005 or 2006, and after Epstein's 2008 conviction brought 225,000 dollars of Epstein's money into MIT for his research. The report MIT commissioned from Goodwin Procter concluded in January 2020 that he had "purposefully failed to inform MIT" that Epstein, a convicted sex offender, was the source of the 2012 donations; MIT placed him on paid administrative leave the day the report was released and imposed five years of restrictions in December 2020.¹²³⁴

Epstein's Science Circle

Lloyd told The New York Times that he met Epstein in 2004 at a dinner Brockman organized; Brockman's gatherings and his Edge Foundation were the setting in which several scientists first encountered Epstein.⁴ On April 27, 2009, while Epstein was still serving the sentence that followed his 2008 Florida guilty plea in the custody of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, he wrote an email saying that a woman named in it "can meet have dinner lunch a weekend with any of the following," listing "seth lloyd mit quantum computing," Murray Gell-Mann of the Santa Fe Institute, Brian Greene of Columbia University, Leonard Susskind, Lawrence Krauss of the Origins Institute in Phoenix and Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute, and adding, "she can see the large hadron collider in switzerland. private tour." The copy produced by JPMorgan Chase and filed in the Virgin Islands suit against the bank shows it addressed to the JPMorgan email account of Jes Staley.⁵ Lloyd visited Epstein at his office during his work release.¹

Photographs from a 2012 lunch at Martin Nowak's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, posted on an Epstein foundation website, showed Epstein with Lloyd, Leon Black, George Church, Eric Lander, David Gergen, Howard Gardner, Ted Kaptchuk and Henry Rosovsky.⁶ From at least August 2014 the website jeffreyepstein.net stated that "Jeffrey Epstein AI sponsors many leading scientists at the forefront of AI research, including Marvin Minsky and Seth Lloyd at MIT," referring to Marvin Minsky.⁷

The Donations

The Goodwin Procter investigation, based on 73 interviews and more than 610,000 emails and documents, found that Epstein made ten donations to MIT totaling 850,000 dollars between 2002 and 2017. After the first, 100,000 dollars for Minsky's research in 2002, the nine post-conviction gifts went to the MIT Media Lab (525,000 dollars) or to Lloyd (225,000 dollars): two donations of 50,000 dollars in 2012 and one of 125,000 dollars in 2017. The report found that Epstein's post-conviction visits and gifts were driven by the Media Lab's director, Joi Ito, or by Lloyd, and that the 2012 gifts served Epstein as "a trial balloon" to test MIT's willingness to take his money.¹²

On June 7, 2012, Lloyd told MIT staff to expect a donation without naming the donor, giving only the name of Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff as the person "taking care of the donation from the donor's end." The investigators wrote that "the only reasonable inference is that Professor Lloyd did this to obscure the fact that Epstein was the donor," and that "Professor Lloyd knew that donations from Epstein would be controversial and that MIT might reject them. We conclude that, in concert with Epstein, he purposefully decided not to alert the Institute to Epstein's criminal record." A presidential acknowledgment letter bearing L. Rafael Reif's signature, dated August 16, 2012, thanked Epstein for the gift.¹² Lloyd acknowledged that the earlier 60,000 dollar gift had been deposited in a personal bank account and not reported to MIT.²

Lloyd's Account

In a post of January 16, 2020 Lloyd wrote that "The accusation that I accepted money from Epstein is true," but that "The accusation that I hid Epstein's identity from MIT ... is completely false." He said that in 2012 he had put "the donor's agent" in touch with his departmental administrator and that MIT officers "considered the donation with full knowledge that Epstein was the donor," quoting an email: "Jeffrey Epstein intends to make a gift in the amount of $100,000 in two tranches of $50,000 for the discretionary research for the support of Seth Lloyd." He wrote that on June 1, 2017 MIT's Office of the Recording Secretary had noted that Epstein's past gifts were "recorded anonymously." Of the 2005 or 2006 money he wrote that Epstein had suggested he "set up a 501c3 corporation as a vehicle for the grant" and in the end gave it as a gift, "on which I paid gift tax."⁸

Discipline

President Reif placed Lloyd, a tenured professor, on paid administrative leave on January 10, 2020.² The physics department head, Peter Fisher, suspended Lloyd's secondary appointment in physics, writing on February 4 that he "will no longer be able to supervise new graduate students, attend Departmental events or serve on Departmental committees."⁹

Provost Martin A. Schmidt announced on December 18, 2020 the result of a two-stage faculty review. A panel of five senior faculty chaired by the dean of science, Nergis Mavalvala, and including Daron Acemoglu, found by majority that in accepting the 2012 donations Lloyd had violated MIT's conflict of interest policy "by failing to inform MIT that Epstein was a convicted sex offender," and thereby its policy on faculty misconduct. The full panel found that he had not violated MIT policy in accepting the 2005 or 2006 gift or the 2017 donation, did not find "that Professor Lloyd tried to circumvent the MIT vetting process nor that he sought to conceal the name of the donor," but concluded that he "failed to reveal crucial information about Epstein's background to anyone at MIT." For five years MIT limited his compensation, "his ability to engage in solicitation of donors and foundations, and his involvement in first-year undergraduate advising," and required training on professional conduct before he resumed certain activities, including teaching. Schmidt wrote: "These steps cannot undo the harm done. Professor Lloyd's failure to share what he knew about Epstein's conviction when he accepted his 2012 donations was unacceptable."³