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He’s working on Elon Musk’s ‘plutocratic coup.’ Last year, he won a $100,000 grant to promote ‘democratic governance’ in AI

He called for increased ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘public steering’ of AI development.

Photo of Jason Wilson

Jason Wilson

Photo of Ethan Shaotran over a photo of Elon Musk and The Capitol Building.
Shutterstock; Harvard

One of the engineers helping Elon Musk do an end run around democratic and constitutional safeguards via what’s being called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) won a $100,000 grant last year for his proposals for “democratic governance” of artificial intelligence and previously invoked the United States Constitution in a paper on “AI alignment.”

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According to reporting from Wired on Sunday, Ethan Shaotran is one of a group of young engineers who have been granted what’s known as “A-suite clearance” at the General Services Administration (GSA)—a designation that provides full access to the agency’s IT infrastructure and physical spaces, including its executive floor.

Democratic lawmakers Monday described the moves as a “plutocratic coup” and a “constitutional crisis.”

And yet in January 2024, Shaotran’s startup, Energize AI, won $100,000 in the Democratic inputs to AI grant program held by tech heavyweight OpenAI. Grant winners were to “design, build, and test ideas that use democratic methods to decide the rules that govern AI systems,” according to the web page showcasing the winners. 

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His company’s entry in that competition was adapted from a 2023 paper which Shaotran wrote with co-authors including one, who according to his LinkedIn page is, like Shaotran, an Energize AI team member and a student at Harvard University.

The paper specifically criticized how major AI labs make decisions about their models “behind closed doors” and called for greater public oversight on AI “alignment”—a term used in the tech industry for the effort to ensure AI systems behave in accordance with human values and intentions.

The Daily Dot contacted Musk and Shaotran for comment.

David Gerard is an author, IT systems administrator, and a leading AI skeptic who writes with Amy Castor at the Pivot to AI website.

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In a phone call, he said of Shaotran’s paper that “AI alignment is an imaginary field. It doesn’t exist.”

“AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire,” Gerard added.

Shaotran’s paper couched the current moment in AI in terms of writing the U.S. Constitution. The paper states, “In 1776, the United States embarked on a novel task: a constitution committee was convened to develop a constitution to guide the nation.”

The Constitution’s separation of powers between the branches of government is precisely what critics accuse Musk and his functionaries of upending.

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Gerard told the Daily Dot, “There’s no evidence here that Shaotran has any understanding of the hard bits of human governance” and “this is [a] walking a lump of privilege we’re talking about here.“

Like the other young engineers who have issued orders to entire departments, demanded entry into secure facilities, and locked out bureaucrats, and with Musk “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Shaotran has no apparent government experience, he added, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Musk advocates shuttering the agency tasked with distributing foreign humanitarian aid and development assistance.

As of last September Shaotran was a senior at Harvard studying computer science, according to a profile piece in Business Insider. He has co-authored three technical papers, according to Google Scholar searches, including “Aligned: a Platform-based Process for Alignment.” The paper advocates methods of AI alignment that the authors described as more democratic.

The paper’s proposals include a system broadly modeled on the Community Notes feature Musk introduced on X wherein participants could propose and vote on guidelines on AI behavior. The paper says, “Artificial general intelligence (AGI), by its very generalized nature, must be aligned with the values, interests, and intents of the general populace.” 

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The same proposal appears in the document Shaotran adapted for OpenAI’s competition.

The paper’s fears of the birth of an AI “superintelligence,” however, and its references to historical “inflection points” echoes language common in “rationalist” and “effective altruist” circles, where concerns about AI safety sometimes advocate more centralized, technocratic approaches to governance. A technocratic society would be run by elite experts on technology—an antithesis to a democratic society.

On the “rationalist” subculture that Shaotran appears to align with, Gerard said, “They think everything is a logic puzzle that has solutions. Plug in the inputs, run it through a constitution, get outputs.”

“It’s like chronic engineer syndrome except much much worse,” Gerard said, referring to a popular coinage Urban Dictionary defines as “a tendency for some engineers to believe that they can solve complex problems in unrelated fields by applying typical engineering strategies.”

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Shaotran’s calls in his writings for greater “trustworthiness” and “public steering” of AI development arguably sit uneasily with his work with Musk, who has been widely accused of seizing government resources.

Musk’s associates have reportedly gained control of the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration, with access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, potentially allowing them access to sensitive information about millions of citizens and businesses.

On Monday, congressional Democrats were denied entry to USAID when they attempted to inspect it after criticizing Musk and President Donald Trump in a series of speeches in front of the building.In response, on Tuesday, groups plan to gather in front of the Treasury Building to protest what they describe as Musk’s “takeover” of the levers of power.


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