TIME Reporters Accused of AI-Doomer Funding; Taylor Lorenz Pushes Back
kyliebytes · x · 2026-09-16
A dispute over whether TIME's AI coverage is compromised by funder ties:
- Critics said two reporters on the byline are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI-doomer org controlled by Kamala Harris megadonor Dustin Moskovitz, and that TIME failed to disclose the affiliation.
- Taylor Lorenz called this "anti-EA psychosis": reporter Harry was indeed on a Tarbell fellowship when he joined TIME, but it was publicly disclosed, he became a staffer a year ago, and has since done extensive balanced coverage.
- She added that Billy Perrigo's story on Sam Altman's orb startup was supported by a Tarbell grant, disclosed both on the TIME article and in his own Substack post; Tarbell only began giving story grants in 2024, while Billy has written for TIME since 2017 with hundreds of stories.
- The third byline, Naomi Nix, she called an excellent tech policy journalist with an impeccable record.
More from AGI Musings
- 'Meatwashing': manually rewriting AI output to hide its origin, and why it's a double waste — JeremyNguyenPhD · 2026-11-02
- AI safety researcher: AI companies entirely lack this kind of effective human oversight — davidmanheim · 2026-11-02
- Long-read: AI's real value comes after the efficiency era—infra glut, agent tooling boom — yangyi · 2026-11-02
- vikhyat predicts alternating compute oversupply and undersupply on the road to AGI — TheZachMueller · 2026-11-02
- Sam Altman: AI has surpassed top scientists, and 2026 will be a turning point year — kimmonismus · 2026-11-02
- DeepSeek design doc: a person can only follow 3-5 agent sessions at once, attention is the real bottleneck — heyshrutimishra · 2026-11-02