Ellison served 14 months and now works in AI safety grants

Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda Research and testified against Sam Bankman-Fried, works at a charity called Manifund. She started on trial in July and went full time in August, publishing under the name Carol, The Block reports. Open the team page today and Carol N is listed as Senior Researcher and Ops, one line below the founder.

“I believe in redemption. Caroline has admitted her faults, worked to make creditors whole, and served her time in prison.”

— Austin Chen, Manifund, 11 September 2026

Austin Chen, cofounder and chief executive of Manifund

Ellison answered with a line about the terms of the deal: she is grateful to Chen for a second chance and for judging her on her current work rather than her past. Both statements describe a hiring decision. The numbers around it are heavier.

Fourteen months

Her sentence was the short one in this case:

• Judge Kaplan sentenced her on 24 September 2024 to two years and an $11 billion forfeiture.
• She reported to a low-security prison in Connecticut on 7 November 2024 and left in January 2026.
• That is roughly fourteen months of a twenty-four-month term, a little under 60% of it.

Bankman-Fried got 25 years and, on the ninetieth day of a ninety-day window, asked the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction and the $11 billion forfeiture. Her testimony is part of the record he is asking the court to set aside. She spent the first year of his appeal working out a grants platform's product problems.

The field she rejoined

Manifund is what makes this more than a second-chance story. Manifund is a 501(c)(3) that runs three funding mechanisms: open fundraising for nonprofit proposals, delegated budgets handed to expert regrantors, and impact markets where funders back projects competing for charitable prizes. Most of its money goes to AI safety and effective altruism, the same movement FTX bankrolled.

FTX built its own version of this. The Future Fund launched in February 2022, committed about $160 million by November, and collapsed with the exchange. Five of its officials resigned on 10 November 2022, writing that many promised grants would go unpaid and that they had fundamental questions about the business funding them. Charities that had already received money spent the next two years facing clawback claims from the bankruptcy estate.

Ellison has rejoined the field her employer's fraud funded and then drained, and its largest cause is AI risk. Chen knew all of that when he hired her. The line about redemption is a position he is taking in public.

The name on the page

Whether she deserves work is settled, and Chen settled it. The pseudonym on a public team page is the part that does not hold, because the employer has already said the name out loud. Donors choosing a regrantor see Carol N. The people deciding whether to give money to an AI safety project through this platform learn who processed it from a news story, not from the page they are reading.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice; treat it as information to consider.