A conservative nonprofit is organizing nationwide protests against AI data centers Saturday — but none of the protests target communities with Anthropic-affiliated projects.
Humans First is hosting Saturday’s “Nationwide Day of Protest” in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Texas and New York. However, the nonprofit has not registered any protests in the specific towns home to Anthropic’s facilities in those same states, according to its website.
“We didn’t choose the places for protests. Individuals in those communities chose to organize them,” a spokesperson for Humans First told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Feel free to attend any of these protests and talk to the conservative grassroots who want nothing to do with the big tech and big AI companies who have spent the last 10 years silencing and deplatforming conservatives”
“This is a grassroots movement for We the People against Big Tech, and Anthropic are just as guilty of invading our communities and endangering our way of life, our liberty, our security as all the rest of Big Tech,” the Humans First spokesperson added. Anthropic, just like the rest of these Big AI companies, hide behind shell companies and NDAs [non-disclosure agreements], so how are we meant to know which data centers are being used by Anthropic!”
Humans First and Anthropic are both allegedly connected to the effective altruism movement and Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder and Anthropic investor, the Washington Examiner reported. Effective altruism is a social movement that prioritizes doing the most good possible.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“One day. 100+ protests. Across 38 states. And growing. Be part of the day when Americans everywhere stand up to defend their communities. Host a protest. Find one near you. Join the fight,” Humans First said in a Friday post to X.
When Humans First started out, Moskovitz funded the project through Open Philanthropy, the Washington Examiner reported. Moskovitz believes in effective altruism, which “asks individuals how they can make the biggest difference or maximize the good they can do in the world [and] invites people to use evidence and reason to determine how to benefit others as much as possible,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In practice, “[effective altruism’s] adherents mix progressive goals with libertarian instincts to maximize their positive impact on society,” according to the Washington Examiner.
“I don’t know what these ties to Dustin Moskovitz you speak of are – we have never met with him, we have never taken money from him,” a Humans First spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. ” I don’t even know what effective altruism is or why that is relevant to data center fights.”
The effective altruism movement “has consolidated into a $43 billion pipeline channeling capital into left-of-center causes, dark money operations, and a regulatory agenda aimed squarely at the Trump administration,” a Bull Moose Project report found. The America First advocacy group identified about $5.9 billion in spending throughout the effective altruism network that went to left-wing causes and political infrastructure.
“In the spirit of the Tea Party, we are announcing a Nationwide Day of Protest against the unchecked and unwanted expansion of AI data centers and the dangerous AI systems being built within them to be held on Saturday July 18th,” Humans First chair Amy Kremer told Axios in June.
Conservatives have been neglected by “[politicians] doing the bidding of big tech and big AI billionaires,” Kremer added.
(DCNF)
