Anthropic's Series A Lead Tallinn 'Terrified' of AI He Funded

Jaan Tallinn led the $124 million Series A that launched Anthropic in 2021, and he says he did it because he is "terrified AI will kill us all."

That is the setup for Kate Clark's profile in the Wall Street Journal, which puts the headline "He's Completely Terrified of AI—and He's About to Make Billions Off It" over an Estonian Skype co-creator who has poured roughly $170 million into AI safety work and now stands to make billions when Anthropic goes public.

Tallinn is candid about the contradiction. "On the one hand, it's great to have this safety-focused thing. On the other hand, this is proliferation," he tells the WSJ, referring to Anthropic itself. The paper frames it more plainly: he "worries about 'surviving' with AI."

Much of his giving moves through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has organized some $150 million across more than 300 projects, including the model-evaluation shop METR and forecaster Epoch AI. He also co-founded the Future of Life Institute and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and put early money into both Anthropic and DeepMind. Ahead of the profile, he spent a week at the UN General Assembly in New York making the case that artificial intelligence could end humanity.

His own summary of the trade, in the piece: "I'm not investing to profit from LLMs—I'm investing because I'm terrified AI will kill us all."

The profile lands in a busy week of coverage around Anthropic's inner circle, alongside SNL's parody of CEO Dario Amodei as a stuttering doomsayer and a separate WSJ report that early Anthropic employees are weighing buying remote US land as a relocation plan if AI goes awry.