The Revolving Door Map

A revolving door is supposed to admit one person at a time. This one runs in batches.

The tables below trace the careers of the people who actually move policy: in and out of the Council on Foreign Relations, in and out of Treasury and State and the Fed, in and out of Goldman and Citi and BlackRock, sometimes adding a presidency in the middle for variety. Each row sources to an organization’s own membership record, an OpenSecrets file, or a primary-document disclosure — financial-statement filing, congressional record, archived annual report. Nothing here is inference.

Where it appears in print: The Ratchet, Chapter 6 (“The Club”). The book chapter narrates the pipeline; this page maintains the map as personnel rotate.

The graph above is the live force-directed map (people are hollow rings, institutions are filled dots; the live node and transition counts read out in the corner of the viewport), colored by sector and now merged with the sourced research-entity layer — including the whole AI content-policy apparatus. Filter by sector, network, administration, or topic; search a name; click any node to light up everyone it connects to; or pick a cluster to isolate one documented thread and dim the rest — including the computed cross-membership cut, which surfaces every actor wired into two or more institutions or networks at once. The tables below are the static index.

The Pipeline

CFR → Government → Finance → CFR

Secretaries of State (CFR Members, 1945-2013)

Approximately 15 of 18 confirmed CFR members at appointment OR during tenure: Stettinius, Acheson, Dulles, Herter, Rusk, Kissinger, Vance, Haig, Shultz, Baker, Christopher, Albright, Powell, Rice, Clinton.

Sources: CFR membership directory (members log-in), CFR annual reports, G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? — University of California Santa Cruz whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu (academic catalog of CFR/government personnel overlap; supplemented by Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: A History of the Council on Foreign Relations — archive.org).

Trilateral Commission → Carter Administration

26+ Trilateral Commission members staffed senior Carter Administration roles including: Brzezinski (National Security Advisor), Vance (Secretary of State), Brown (Secretary of Defense), Blumenthal (Treasury), Young (UN Ambassador), Volcker (Fed Chair), Huntington (NSC).

Sources: Trilateral Commission member list (Wikipedia) (sourced from Trilateral’s annual reports), Carter Administration appointment records — Jimmy Carter Library.

IMF / World Bank Leadership

• Every IMF Managing Director has been European (80 years, no exception). Source: IMF historical leadership list.
• Every World Bank President has been American (80 years, no exception). Source: World Bank historical presidents.
• Gentlemen’s agreement (US picks World Bank, Europe picks IMF) is well-documented; the post-2011 review explicitly considered ending it and did not. Source: Brookings 2011 analysis, CGD on the 2019 selection.
• Rodrigo Rato: IMF MD → convicted of embezzlement (Bankia case). Source: El País coverage.

AI Industry → Government → AI Industry

• Jason Matheny: IARPA Director (2018-21) → Biden White House NSC/OSTP Deputy Director for National Security (2021-22) → RAND Corporation CEO (2022-present, EA-aligned via Open Philanthropy funding network). Sources: RAND leadership, Biden NSC announcement, Open Philanthropy grants to RAND.
• Holden Karnofsky: Open Philanthropy co-CEO → Anthropic (2024); spouse Daniela Amodei is Anthropic President. Sources: Open Philanthropy staff page archive, Anthropic Daniela Amodei bio.
• OpenAI board late-2023: of 6 seats during the Sam-Altman-firing crisis, 3 were EA-aligned individuals (Helen Toner — Georgetown CSET / Open Philanthropy ties; Tasha McCauley — Effective Ventures board; Adam D’Angelo — Asana / Quora founder). Source: NYT reconstruction, Helen Toner CSET.
• Scott Gottlieb: FDA Commissioner (2017-19) → Pfizer board (June 2019, ~3 months after departure). Source: Pfizer DEF 14A 2020, POGO investigation.
• Billy Tauzin: As Chair of House Energy & Commerce, wrote the 2003 Medicare Part D drug benefit prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices → resigned from Congress in early 2005, became PhRMA President in January 2005 at ~$2M/year. Sources: 60 Minutes investigation (2007), POGO Tauzin file.

Tech / National Security Pipelines

• Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO): Defense Innovation Board chair (2016-20) → multiple AI/national-security advisory roles (NSCAI chair 2018-21) → Schmidt Futures funder of NSCAI-linked policy organizations. Source: NSCAI Final Report, DOJ Inspector General audit of Schmidt advisory roles.
• Anne Neuberger: NSA Director of Cybersecurity → Biden Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Tech (2021-25). Source: White House bio archive.
• Palantir → DOD personnel: documented in Senate disclosure filings; specific names rotate. Use USA Spending personnel records as the primary source for current state.

The Clusters

The graph above holds over a thousand nodes. Stare at the whole thing and you see a hairball; that is the point of a hairball. These preset views pull a single documented thread out of the tangle so you can read one career pattern at a time. None of them is a claim that anyone is steering anything. They are curated readings of independently sourced public careers — every node links out to its own citation.

★ AI CONTENT-POLICY APPARATUS

The densest thread on the board, and the newest: the named people, institutions and money that decide what a frontier model will and won’t say. It is not one pipeline but four machines — who writes the refusals, who runs the bans, who works the governments, and who ordains the profession — plus the funding hub that pays all four. The flagship preset lights the whole apparatus; the facet presets below pull each machine out on its own. Every node sources to the labs’ own published documents, the institutes’ own pages, or the funders’ own disclosures. Method, not motive — the sharpest single receipt is the Model Spec’s own line that “AI lab employees should not be the arbiters of what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to create,” written by the arbiters.

AI · THE FOUR MACHINES

The Character Shop writes what the model says: the refusals are authored by credentialed moral philosophers — Amanda Askell and Joe Carlsmith are named on the cover of Claude’s Constitution. The Enforcement Floor runs the bans (account enforcement at a scale of over a million actions per half-year transparency window, single-digit-percent appeal-and-restore rate); its résumé is a spook’s — Jacob Klein came up through Coinbase trust-and-safety and Google’s counter-violent-extremism shop. The Statecraft Wing is the government revolving door — Chris Lehane (Clinton White House → Airbnb → OpenAI), Jack Clark, Michael Sellitto — but it governs the lab’s politics, not the model’s mouth. The Seminary is the standards-and-academy layer that ordains the profession, staffed by watchdog-to-lab pipes: Ben Nimmo (DFRLab → Graphika → Meta → OpenAI’s head of investigations) and Chris Meserole (Brookings → the lab-funded Frontier Model Forum).

AI · THE FUNDING HUB

The CFR-money analogue. The same short list of funders recurs across the nominally-independent nodes, documented from each recipient’s own disclosures: Open Philanthropy (now “Coefficient Giving”), Eric Schmidt’s science vehicles, and Jaan Tallinn via the Survival and Flourishing Fund. The cleanest single artifact is the Frontier Model Forum’s AI Safety Fund page, which names Schmidt, Tallinn, McGovern and Packard together. Whoever pays the field’s salaries is the hub — not any one person.

AI · EA → LAB/GOV PIPELINE

The recruitment spine, and the correction to a popular theory: the feeder is not online moderators but Effective Altruism and rationalism — and it runs into the governments as much as the labs. Paul Christiano went from the OpenAI alignment team to Head of AI Safety at the US institute; Jade Leung went from an Oxford-adjacent governance shop through OpenAI to CTO of the UK institute. Open Philanthropy seeded the Horizon Institute that places fellows in Congress and the agencies. The counter-examples exist and are named on their own nodes — the pattern explains the field’s plumbing, not the origin of the worry.

THE PAYPAL MAFIA

The archetype people have argued about for twenty years, and the reason a map like this is legible at all: the 2002 PayPal sale seeded a network — Thiel, Musk, Hoffman, Sacks, Lonsdale, Srinivasan — that went on to found or fund Palantir, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Founders Fund, a16z, and now the AI labs themselves. Toggle it next to the AI apparatus and watch the same names bridge both.

GOLDMAN → TREASURY

The bank likes to joke that “GS” stands for Government Sachs, and the org chart does not argue. Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson and Steven Mnuchin all ran Goldman Sachs and then ran the US Treasury; Jon Corzine made the same trip with a Senate seat as a layover; Lloyd Blankfein stayed at the bank but kept the CFR membership. Scott Bessent rounds out the current end of the bench. The edges here are the public record of who held which job, nothing more.

CFR SECRETARIES OF STATE

Since Dean Acheson it has been hard to find a Secretary of State who was not a Council on Foreign Relations member first. Kissinger, Albright, Colin Powell, Rice, Clinton, Kerry and Blinken all carry the card; Richard Haass ran the Council itself. Membership is not a job requirement written down anywhere — it just keeps turning out to be on the résumé.

CARTER / TRILATERAL 1977

David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973. Four years later Brzezinski was National Security Advisor and the Carter administration was conspicuously staffed with fellow members: Cyrus Vance at State, Michael Blumenthal at Treasury, Harold Brown at Defense, Andrew Young at the UN, Warren Christopher as Deputy Secretary. Barry Goldwater wrote a whole chapter about it; you can just read the membership roster instead.

AI-SAFETY → AI-LAB

The modern AI-safety movement promised to build the technology carefully, and then built the labs racing to ship it. Dario Amodei and a cohort left OpenAI over safety disagreements to found Anthropic; Ilya Sutskever left after the board fight; Mira Murati left to start her own lab. Reid Hoffman sat on the OpenAI board and funds the rest of the field. The “safety” and “capabilities” wings turn out to share an alumni directory.

PALANTIR / NAT-SEC TECH

Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale built Palantir to sell software to the intelligence community, then built the venture funds — Founders-Fund-adjacent a16z, Lonsdale’s 8VC — that finance the next generation of defense startups. Eric Schmidt left Google to chair Pentagon advisory boards. This is the seam where Silicon Valley money and the DoD procurement budget meet.

BILDERBERG ATTENDEES

Bilderberg is an annual off-the-record gathering with no minutes and a guest list it mostly does not publish, which is why the attendee record is interesting on its own. Documented invitees here span Kissinger, Rice, Clinton, Rubin and Corzine on the old-establishment side and Thiel, Hoffman and Schmidt on the tech side. The cluster shows the overlap; it does not show what was said, because nobody does.

THE FED CHAIRS

The chair of the Federal Reserve is the most powerful unelected job in American economic life, and the people who hold it tend to have circled through Treasury or the New York Fed on the way. William McChesney Martin, Volcker, Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and Powell are the through-line. Yellen then went the other direction, from Fed chair to Treasury Secretary.

CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL

After 2016 a research apparatus grew up around the study — and flagging — of “misinformation.” Alex Stamos went from Facebook security chief to running the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-founding Krebs Stamos Group; Renée DiResta worked the same nexus; Anika Navaroli came from the Twitter side. The cluster maps the academic-platform overlap that the Twitter Files and the Murthy v. Missouri litigation later made famous.

RUBINOMICS / CLINTON-CITI

Robert Rubin pushed the repeal of Glass-Steagall as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, then took a $100M+ role at the Citigroup that the repeal helped assemble. Larry Summers and Tim Geithner inherited the doctrine and the rotation. Sandy Weill built the Citi that the rules were rewritten around. The revolving door does not get more legible than this one.

RHODES–MILNER ROUND TABLE

Cecil Rhodes left a will instructing the creation of a secret society to extend the British Empire; Alfred Milner’s “Kindergarten” of young administrators carried the idea into the Round Table movement, and the Rhodes Trust still funds the scholarships that send Rhodes Scholars through Oxford. This is the documented historical core that later conspiracy literature wildly over-built. The four nodes here are the part that is actually in the wills and the charters.

FABIAN SOCIETY / LSE

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells founded the Fabian Society to advance socialism by gradualism rather than revolution — and founded the London School of Economics to train the people who would run it. A think tank and a university, built by the same handful of people, for the same project.

PAULSON → BEIJING

Hank Paulson dealt with China constantly as Goldman’s CEO and as Treasury Secretary, then made the relationship his post-government brand: the Paulson Institute, keynotes at the Boao Forum and the China Development Forum, a standing perch at Tsinghua. Kissinger and Schmidt orbit the same set of Chinese state-adjacent venues. The cluster shows the Western elite’s China-access circuit.

CROSS-MEMBERSHIP (≥2)

The other twelve presets each pull one named thread. This one is computed from the whole graph at once: it highlights every node that belongs to two or more institutions or networks and dims the singletons. The thesis is that multi-affiliation is itself the filter — the people and organizations that sit in more than one seat are the load-bearing connective tissue, and a single membership is mostly noise. Toggle it on and the map collapses to the actors who actually bridge the structure; toggle it back off to see them embedded in the full hairball again.

These are the preset views selectable in the CLUSTER row above the graph — pick one to isolate that thread and dim the rest of the map. The last, cross-membership, is computed rather than curated: it isolates the ≥2-affiliation nodes across the entire dataset.

The wider apparatus

The AI clusters above are one thread in a larger structure. The same door-shape recurs across every domain where an industry is governed, and the dataset now maps it cohort by cohort — each person edged from the seat they held to the seat they took, so the rotation is visible rather than asserted. Method, not motive: the point is the structural position, and every claim carries a source.

The AI-governance capture signature

The sharpest instance is AI governance itself, because there the concentrated set that steers the output is the regulated industry. The Frontier Model Forum is founded and funded by the four frontier labs and writes the “safety best practices” for frontier models. The US AI Safety Institute evaluates models it can only see by the labs’ permission (pre-deployment access agreements) and staffed from the lab-tied evaluation shops those same labs fund. The EU’s Code of Practice was drafted with the model-makers in the room. And the seat that removes any doubt about which way the door runs: Paul Nakasone — until 2024 the director of the NSA — now sits on OpenAI’s board. Companion principal dossiers: Michael Kratsios, Arati Prabhakar, Tino Cuéllar, Ben Buchanan, Elizabeth Kelly, Rumman Chowdhury, Miles Brundage, Sriram Krishnan, Shyam Sankar.

The domain doors

• Health & trade (the IGO layer). The bodies that set global health and trade policy are staffed through the same rotation — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (World Bank → WTO), Tedros Adhanom (Ethiopia government → WHO), Julie Gerberding (CDC director → Merck), Robert Califf (FDA → Alphabet’s Verily → FDA). Health-agency-to-pharma-board is a well-worn track: Scott Gottlieb (FDA → Pfizer/UnitedHealth boards), Alex Azar (Eli Lilly → HHS).
• Intelligence, monetized. The exit from the surveillance state runs to consulting firms, corporate boards, and cable-news contracts at once — David Petraeus (CIA → KKR), James Stavridis (NATO → Carlyle), and the advisory-firm hub (WestExec, Beacon Global, the Chertoff Group) that sells access back to the agencies its principals used to run.
• Defense. Pentagon leadership and defense-contractor boards trade seats continuously — Jim Mattis (SecDef → General Dynamics), the WestExec/Booz Allen/Anduril/Palantir circuit — while the vendor’s executives take military commissions (Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO → Army Reserve).
• The clerk pipeline. The legal establishment runs clerk → Solicitor General / White House Counsel → BigLaw partner → back, with a corporate board seat attached: Jamie Gorelick (DOJ → WilmerHale → Amazon board), Viet Dinh (DOJ → Kirkland → Fox board), Kathryn Ruemmler (DOJ/White House → Latham → Goldman).

Surveillance firms and the data-broker loophole

The physical-surveillance vendors — Axon, Flock Safety, Verkada, Clearview AI, Palantir, ID.me — are the sharpest version of the pattern, because their boards are stacked with the officials who used to run the agencies that buy from them (a former Surgeon General and police chiefs at Axon; a Federal Advisory Board of ex-CISA/USSOCOM/GSA figures at Verkada; a former Assistant Secretary of Defense at Clearview). This is not a perk. It is the transmission belt for the data-broker loophole: the government cannot warrantlessly collect the data (the Supreme Court’s Carpenter line), so it buys it from commercial brokers — a practice the Intelligence Community admits in its own declassified report on Commercially Available Information, and which Congress drafted the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act to stop. The official rotates out to the vendor; the vendor sells back to the agency the thing the agency could not lawfully collect itself.

Bridges

• convergence-table — what these networks have built across jurisdictions
• ai-governance-tracker — where the AI-industry pipeline is producing regulation
• the-record — particularly click 6 (“The Club”)

Sources

All citation links are inline with the relevant row above.

Standing data sources:

• CFR membership directory
• CFR annual reports — public, audited, historical
• Trilateral Commission members — official
• OpenSecrets — Revolving Door database — searchable by name across thousands of US officials
• POGO investigations index — focus on regulatory capture
• G. William Domhoff, “Who Rules America?” — UC Santa Cruz academic project, 50-year longitudinal CFR/policy-network mapping
• Bilderberg Meetings official site — participant lists 1954-present
• WEF Young Global Leaders directory