From Pints to AI Prompts:
How Neoprohibitionists and Effective Altruists Want to Run Your Life
Executive Summary
Neoprohibitionism, the social and political movement dedicated to banning or limiting any substance considered dangerous to public health, has evolved. The scope is larger and more sweeping than the public moral crusades of the past. It now builds authority inside international bodies and the scientific class, and then exports it to the national agencies that defer to them. And it has new flagbearers.
Effective Altruism has joined the neoprohibitionist fold.
Effective Altruism began as a rigorous, evidence-tested strategy for philanthropy. Rather than invest in causes that made donors feel good, it promised the best measurable results for humanity. It won praise among philosophers, economists, and wealthy people who wanted evidence-based giving to do the most good.
Somewhere along the way, the pursuit of influence eclipsed the pursuit of evidence. Today, hundreds of millions of dollars flow from a small circle of Effective Altruism funders into advocacy groups, research shops, and fellowship programs that build shadow structures to restrict individual choice and new technology in the name of a new “safety” paradigm. The playbook began with the temperance movement’s war on alcohol, and the same mechanism is now shaping AI regulation. The tactics are the same, and so now are the funders.
Our findings:
A global abstinence group sits inside the WHO:
Movendi International, the renamed international body of the 175-year-old Independent Order of Good Templars, holds official relations status with the World Health Organization and is one of four groups coordinating civil society engagement in the WHO’s global SAFER alcohol initiative.
EA grants lead to higher consumption taxes on alcohol:
A $63,000 seed grant from an Effective Altruism incubator helped lay the groundwork for an “investment case” on alcohol taxes in Sri Lanka. GiveWell then recommended $15 million for RESET Alcohol to advocate for higher alcohol taxes, and Sri Lanka raised its alcohol excise duties by about 20% in July 2023 and another 14% in January 2024.
Funded researchers write national drinking guidance:
Canada’s 2023 guidance cut the “low-risk” threshold from 15 drinks a week for men and 10 for women down to just two. Three of its most influential authors have documented ties to Movendi International, including Movendi-funded research and Movendi-paid travel, conflicts the guidance’s own review judged to be “of low significance.”
The same donors also fund the AI safety movement:
The funders behind the alcohol tax campaign, specifically Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, also bankroll the leading “AI safety” groups, a fellowship program that places staffers in congressional offices and federal agencies, and groups pushing a new wave of state laws to constrain frontier AI models.
This matters because consumers pay for all of this in the form of higher prices, narrower choices, biased health “guidance” shaped by funded research, and AI technology that arrives later, costs more, or never even reaches them at all.
As we will explore in our policy section, we recommend full disclosure of who funds the “technical assistance” that writes this legislation; conflict-of-interest rules that apply to advocates lobbying institutions; and a firm limit on agencies treating outside guidance as binding law without public comment or democratic input.
Introduction
Neoprohibitionism, the social and political movement dedicated to banning or limiting any substance considered dangerous to public health, has evolved. The scope is larger and more sweeping than the public moral crusades of the past. It now builds authority inside international bodies and the scientific class, and then exports it to the national agencies that defer to them. And it has new flagbearers.
Effective Altruism has joined the neoprohibitionist fold.
Effective Altruism began as a rigorous, evidence-tested strategy for philanthropy. Rather than invest in causes that made donors feel good, it promised the best measurable results for humanity. It won praise among philosophers, economists, and wealthy people who wanted evidence-based giving to do the most good.
Somewhere along the way, the pursuit of influence eclipsed the pursuit of evidence. Today, hundreds of millions of dollars flow from a small circle of Effective Altruism funders into advocacy groups, research shops, and fellowship programs that build shadow structures to restrict individual choice and new technology in the name of a new “safety” paradigm. The playbook began with the temperance movement’s war on alcohol, and the same mechanism is now shaping AI regulation. The tactics are the same, and so now are the funders.
The expertise pipeline
1. Fund
Private philanthropists finance advocacy NGOs and university centers that produce studies, modeling, and policy toolkits.
2. Certify
Supranational bodies like the WHO or a UN scientific panel publish and amplify those findings as neutral technical guidance. In the cases we document, these are shaped or written by the same people tied to the funding groups.
3. Embed
The same funders pay for advisers placed inside government ministries and legislative offices, where the guidance is turned into policy.
4. Incorporate
National agencies adopt the guidance by reference, in dietary guidelines, label rules, tax structures, or legal safe harbors.
5. Entrench
Courts defer to this guidance as expert consensus, and legislatures and parliaments cite it as evidence.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
Rather than accept a system in which privately funded networks write public rules, governments should restore the accountability that ordinary rulemaking is supposed to carry.
1
Disclose who pays for “technical assistance.”
Governments should require registration and funding disclosure for any outside group that drafts legislation or tax schedules, as they would for lobbyists. Fiscally sponsored projects should report their donors and spending separately rather than disappearing into a sponsor’s consolidated return.
2
Apply conflict-of-interest rules to everyone.
WHO member states should insist that the Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors applies to advocacy groups as strictly as it applies to industry. Authors of national dietary guidance should disclose funding from advocacy organizations, and agencies should treat it as a real conflict, not a “low” one.
3
Stop turning outside guidance into law by reference.
Congress and state legislatures should bar agencies from giving binding effect to external guidance without full notice-and-comment review, with sunset clauses so incorporated standards are re-examined. After Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), courts should give no special deference to agency-adopted outside guidance.
4
Keep tax policy sovereign.
Excise mandates don’t belong in IMF and World Bank loan conditions, and any memorandum of understanding between a government and a philanthropic consortium should be made public.
4
Protect open competition in AI.
Congress should adopt a national AI framework that protects open-source development and rejects licensing regimes that only the largest AI companies can afford.
Author
Yael Ossowski
Deputy Director
Author
David Clement
Policy Director