Alliance for the Future director Brian Chau has history of racist, sexist remarks
In a post on AI regulation, Chau falsely claimed George Floyd was a "domestic abuser"
Brian Chau, founder and director of new AI think tank Alliance for the Future, has a history of expressing racist and sexist remarks, a Transformer investigation has found.
Chau's controversial opinions are evident in his public statements about AI policy. In a January 2024 post about AI deepfakes, Chau falsely claimed that George Floyd, a black man whose 2020 murder by a police officer sparked widespread racial justice protests, was a “domestic abuser”. “George Floyd was a deepfake”, Chau wrote, adding that Floyd’s “life is a rounding error when determining the fakeness of the video”.
In another tweet from December 2023, Chau jokes about a “dark comedy version of Ratatouille where the Harvard president is a [sic] affirmative action hire black woman” who, when testifying to Congress, would “beg a white guy to feed her answers through a brain implant”. At the time of the tweet, Harvard's president was Claudine Gay, a black woman.
Chau, who has previously referred to other journalists as “retards”, did not respond to a request for comment.
Chau has also expressed controversial views about women. In other tweet, he claimed to have solved “the dating crisis” to ensure “men get low body count women”, echoing a common misogynistic trope that women who have fewer sexual partners are more “valuable”. Chau's solution is that “all men simply date women 5 years younger”.
He has also referred to single women as “leftover”, while claiming that a “pretty large subset of [Gen Z] women are literally undateable” because they are “neurotic”. On another occasion, Chau dismissively referred to female climate change activists as “histrionic”. Elsewhere, Chau implies that transgender people are “mentally ill”: in a tweet about “stolen words”, he says that “mentally ill people stole ‘woman’”.
In recent months, Chau has attempted to position himself as a major figure in the AI policy debate. He has been featured in Politico multiple times, and received endorsement from mainstream think tank voices such as Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at R Street. (There is no suggestion that Politico or Thierer knew about Chau’s remarks.) Alliance for the Future is currently running a campaign against California Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 1047 bill to regulate AI in the state. The organisation's call-to-action makes several false claims, including that the bill would establish an “unaccountable Frontier Model Division ... with police powers”, which could “throw model developers in jail for the thoughtcrime of doing AI research”. Chau previously said that the bill had been “fast tracked”, a claim rejected by Sen. Wiener.
Chau is particularly preoccupied with efforts to increase gender or racial diversity, saying that diversity “is often used as a euphemism for anti-white and anti-male bias”. He has repeatedly asserted that the US is a “Black Supremacist country”, railing against what he refers to as a the “Black grievance mindset”. In one tweet attacking a female AI activist complaining about a lack of diversity in the field, Chau claimed that she was “a huge net beneficiary of sexism”, instead attributing her feelings to what happens “when incompetent women are placed alongside competent men”. In another tweet, he joked about how the University of Waterloo’s gender statistics (where men outnumber women) might be responsible for its success.
Chau also frequently platforms controversial figures on his podcast, including Curtis Yarvin, who has said neo-Nazis’ hearts are “in the right place”, and Richard Hanania, who recently referred to black people as “animals”. Chau called Hanania a “brilliant analyst and policy thinker” and Yarvin’s episode “among the best”.
Chau's Alliance for the Future is closely linked to the “effective accelerationism”, or e/acc, movement, a group which opposes attempts at regulating AI. The organisation counts e/acc founder Guillaume Verdon as a board member; Verdon, who regularly tweets about being a conduit for a “thermodynamic god”, has said that he is indifferent to the idea of human extinction.