Brian Bodemann

CEO, ARTAN Bio | Advancing RNA therapeutics through a lean, fast-to-clinic model | Reinventing biotech financing with crypto | Genomics × AI × venture | Builder

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

As we age, our cells accumulate somatic mutations, a feature of aging that touches everyone. At @artan_bio we're building therapies + cosmetics to address it. Today we announced a $1M seed, and I'm stepping in as CEO. Advancing toward NHP studies now. https://t.co/vg2RsKNVP2

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@sebastian_gero The space continues to vaccuum up capital and capacity is committed. Try getting a high-speed RAM order before 2028. For data centers, the fallback pivot to open source model hosting will still be lucrative. Frontier "lab" notes carry the highest risk.

[Michael Torres @Mykalt45]

ArtanBio is busy over the next month! @Bodeeeman is presenting at @ARDD_Meeting! I’m presenting at the @ARKInvest @spARKbyARK Innovation showcase! For $vitarna token holders, you’re going to see more of what we’re cooking! Here’s a sneak peak! @artan_bio @vita_dao @BioProtocol

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

I hope he used Claude to uncover this

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.

What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.

Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.

It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.

Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.

It starts with METR.

Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.

He proposes METR for this purpose.

But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.

Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.

And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.

This stock was worth $500 million early last year.

It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.

METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.

Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.

But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.

The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.

The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.

If this were the end of it, that's bad.

But that isn't all.

The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.

The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.

They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.

All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.

As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.

Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.

From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.

This itself is an objective fact.

The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.

But the problem also goes in the other direction:

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.

And that feedback loop is winning.

That's what Jacob Coxon is.

China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.

America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.

Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.

Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.

Congress must investigate.

Evidence and Github in next post.

Then some supplementary figures.

[David Bellamy @DavidRBellamy]

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.

And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

AI Doomerism is and always will be about regulatory capture; however, judging by my conversations with regular folks this weekend, AI Doomerism is landing perfectly with their target audience.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

If ya know, ya know.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@Mykalt45 Taking a moment off crushing to live that Dad life 😁

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@rborkows @dabit3 apple, nvidia or amd silicon?

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@tangming2005 Looks cool. Do you know if the dataset includes somatic mutation calls in exons?

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

if @SpaceX has Quantum ready encryption for direct to cellular internet service on the day traditional algorithms fail it would be a significantly differentiated and perhaps the only internet/financial services (@XMoney) provider in the world

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

What is one chart that represents non trivial danger to the status quo?

This graph is top of mind for me. People will undoubtedly underestimate the compounding of quantum bits from here.

The downstream impact to quantum insecure cryptographic methods, however, cannot be understated.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

Cashmere socks were an unlock I didn't expect

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@DanaFarberNews @PTarantinoMD @DanaFarber @DanaFarber_Hale SFC 😎

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@KwiatBerlin @Mykalt45 DM me and I’ll make arrangements

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@rborkows Babe's til I die!

[Jing Liang 🇺🇦 @AppleHelix]

This is a much longer topic for discussion. But there are 2 types of biotech entrepreneurs. Not saying which is good/bad.

Many biotech "entrepreneurs" are management team for hires. They don't really source their own ideas, don't truly make judgement calls on the assets/ideas. And in many ways, they don't really take risks - as they start day 1 with a good market-rate salary.

When they pitch a story, it was prepared for them by the VCs who found the asset. They are more akin to operating partners brought in by PE firms to run a company.

Then there are founder-entrepreneurs in the sense that they come up with their own ideas/deal-flow. And have to sell the story to both VCs and the team they recruit. Take no salary (or defer salary) until a big round. And even then, take a below-market salary. This is a different skill set and is truly risk taking.

On a risk adjusted NPV basis, the former is more positive. Many CFOs/CBOs get fabulously rich parachuting in 1-2 years before a clinical read-out. Even if it fails, their contract includes a generous 6-12 month severance. They then parachute to another VC NewCo - often before their severance runs out. Rinse and repeat.

The latter is a tough slog. When a guy like @Mykalt45 succeeds, even if the deal size is not as big, it really is a testament to grit.

[Michael Torres @Mykalt45]

Connecting the dots back to @artan_bio. Our drugs have the ability to suppress these other somatic mutations involved in aging. A real chance to move the needle of lifespan and healthspan! Grateful to the DeSci/crypto space for supporting this idea with ethereum:0x7b66e84be78772a3afaf5ba8c1993a1b5d05f9c2.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@lichthauch Humans capture human experience.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@juliabelk @artan_bio If you are exploring in vivo delivery, I highly recommend our partners at @Syenex as a development partner.

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

At @ARTAN_Bio, we are developing gene therapy for a broad class of somatic mutations in HSCs. Excited that our HSC Codon Therapy may reach Microglia!

[Julia Belk @juliabelk]

Gaining therapeutic access to the human brain is one of the biggest unsolved problems in biomedical science.

Today @nature, we uncover a massive influx of immune cells into the human brain during aging, revealing that the brain is more accessible than previously thought. 1/
https://t.co/BuHdVk1V2I

[Brian Bodemann @Bodeeeman]

@jaiswalmdphd Amazing finding. Huge implications for HSCs as a therapeutic target in human aging.