Emails show AGI promoter Ben Goertzel courted Jeffrey Epstein for funding
DOJ files document continued contact after Epstein sex conviction, AI governance debates regulate compute while patronage buys legitimacy
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The latest tranche of Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein has produced a new kind of reputational debris: emails showing AI researcher Ben Goertzel — a long-time promoter of “AGI” — courting Epstein for funding while acknowledging the financier’s criminal record.
Business Insider reports that Goertzel exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein and continued corresponding until at least 2018. The documents include a 2010 email in which Goertzel congratulated Epstein on his release from the Palm Beach County jail after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea on sex charges, including solicitation of a minor. In the same correspondence, Goertzel pitched funding for what he described as the “Sputnik of AI.”
The emails are not primarily interesting as morality theater — Silicon Valley has never been short on people willing to take money from anyone with a checkbook. They are interesting as a case study in how frontier research actually gets financed when institutions preach ethics but run on patronage.
In the correspondence, Epstein appears as a donor-manager with opinions about branding and fundraising — at one point urging Goertzel to cut his “hippie look” to improve capital access, likening the ponytail to “spinach in the teeth,” per Business Insider. Goertzel replied that he would cut his hair “for a lot of AGI money.” If you want a snapshot of the real incentive landscape: it’s not “AI safety,” it’s “investor suitability.”
Goertzel told Business Insider he “made a mistake” accepting Epstein’s money and regretted not doing due diligence, saying he had “basically zero knowledge” of Epstein’s “sexual peculiarities and exploitative practices.” That defense is almost more revealing than the emails. In the sociology-of-science ideal — Merton’s norms of disinterestedness and organized skepticism — the scientist is supposed to be skeptical of claims, methods, and, yes, provenance. In the real world, skepticism is often reserved for competitors’ papers, not for a donor’s background.
The episode also highlights what “AI governance” tends to regulate: compute, model releases, and corporate compliance. But donors are upstream. If a research ecosystem is capital-constrained or politically constrained, it will develop laundering mechanisms: respectable conferences, nonprofits, and “corporate contributions” that convert tainted money into scientific legitimacy. Business Insider notes Goertzel’s online résumé (since removed) said Epstein gave him a $100,000 grant in 2001, and that Epstein agreed to provide at least another $100,000 between 2008 and 2018 across multiple transfers, though the total received is unclear.
None of this proves anything about the technical plausibility of AGI. It does suggest that the people selling grand narratives about “humanity’s future” are still subject to the oldest constraint in science: patronage. And if the next “Sputnik” depends on flattering a convicted sex offender’s sensibilities — hairstyle included — then perhaps the real breakthrough is not artificial general intelligence, but artificial institutional memory.
The critique is not that research should be state-controlled to prevent embarrassing donors; that would merely replace one patronage network with another, more coercive one. Monopoly-like funding channels — whether public grants or prestige gatekeepers — make researchers vulnerable to whoever can bypass them with cash. Competitive, transparent funding and institutional pluralism don’t eliminate bad actors, but they make it harder for any single one to buy an entire narrative.