Brisbane AI software company Safe Worlds TV on brink of collapse, $49m disappears

The way people talk about him, you’d think he was a god.

It’s as if the words ‘He’ and ‘Him’ should be capitalised in every sentence when Queensland software system designer Alan Metcalfe is mentioned.

But now years later, some of His devout followers are losing the faith.

Was he a madman or a genius? Or a fraudster?

These are the questions more than 600 investors are asking years after pouring $49 million into Alan’s artificial intelligence software called Safe Worlds, which was supposed to revolutionise the internet, but years later, has left them wondering what happened to all their money.

And the answer is a secret that Alan ultimately took to the grave with him after dying of a heart attack in February 2017.

Safe Worlds passed on to his wife Mary, who confirmed to news.com.au the company has been non-operational for the past six years while she looks for a buyer. She strenuously denied that her husband or the business were in any way fraudulent and there is no suggestion she engaged in fraud or any other wrongdoing.

With no functioning product, investors fear their chances of getting their cash back – which in many cases was a substantial portion of their life savings – will require a miracle.

Before Alan’s death, the charismatic company founder, with a larger-than-life presence both metaphorically and literally due to his broad and tall physique, thought he had invented something that would rival the likes of Google and Facebook.

Alan claimed to have discovered the secrets of artificial intelligence while reading the Bible in 1999.

Safe Worlds became a registered business in Pennsylvania, USA, in 2010, but Alan and Mary Metcalfe moved to Australia shortly after and set up another office in Brisbane.

From 2011 to 2017, they sought outside investment.

According to an information memorandum from 2016 obtained by news.com.au, they had at that point in time managed to raise $49,716,381, largely from a pool of Australian investors.

The document, which revealed the company aimed to raise $5 million in additional capital, claimed investing in it was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

Safe Worlds was supposed to be an e-business system hosted through an internet television platform using artificial intelligence.

A former contractor of Safe Worlds, Tahlee-Joy Grace, described Alan’s invention to news.com.au as “a really crappy imitation of Amazon and YouTube put together”.

In the information pack, potential investors were told that Alan had discovered how to monetise the internet by discovering ‘Universal Logic’, a process which he believed every human mind used to create thoughts, and therefore could be harnessed through AI to advertise products and make money.

“There is only one Law of Thought … by which all humans think and communicate, even though we think about many different things,” the memorandum reads.

“The uniqueness of the Law of Thought is what makes Artificial General Intelligence so difficult to find. It is what makes Alan Metcalfe’s discovery of the Law of Thought so important and so valuable.”

The document went on to claim that Alan’s discovery would “kick start the lacklustre World Economy; and that Safe Worlds TV will be an important catalyst in making this happen”.

Investors were also assured the technology had been beta tested and had the support of prominent academics in its field and that an IPO was in the works.

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Not only did Safe Worlds fail to resurrect the global economy, it also left a trail of devastated investors in its wake.

An email dated 2014 claimed there were 600 shareholders. The top 20 shareholders held 75 per cent of the issued capital, according to a 2016 company document. That means 20 investors hold $36 million worth of shares between them.

Charlie Wijnveen, a Dutch businessman who worked for a time in Australia, invested $56,000 while his friend David Gorman, from Sydney, put $20,000 into the venture.

Prominent former rugby league footballer Michael Blake handed over $300,000 to Safe Worlds and was also on its advisory board.

Dr Sean Eastwood, a chiropractor from Perth, wouldn’t say how much he invested, although he acknowledged it was in the low six figures.

News.com.au also knows of one individual who invested around $1 million into Safe Worlds, but who declined to be interviewed.

Many have never recovered financially from making the investment.

For Mr Wijnveen, 61, looking back on his dealings with Alan and the company, he said its capital raising methods should have raised a red flag.

“There was no contract signed (when I invested the money). The only thing I received was a certificate,” he told news.com.au.

“In the first certificate my name was spelt wrong. (Later) they sent me a new one with the right name on it.”

Mary Metcalfe, the company’s current director, defended the certificates, saying “As is normal practice all investors received share certificates. We still have copies of all such certificates in the share register”.

Do you believe?

Alan’s religion guided his business practice, which at times had investors and employees doubting his sanity.

“Do you believe in God?” was how he would start high-stakes business meetings with potential shareholders, some with millions of cash to invest.

Once he was even put in front of a man who was consulting with the US military on AI the following week.

And yet Alan still asked him the loaded question, even when the advisory panel pulled him aside and warned him not to beforehand.

One person who preferred to remain anonymous described him as “off the rails”, especially when he “banged the bible drum”.

“He also confused his role as CEO of the company as evangelist spruiking,” they added.

Tahlee-Joy Grace, who worked as a senior developer at the Safe Worlds Brisbane office in 2014, said they quit their role after less than a year because Alan was a “far right religious nut job”.

“Alan basically offered me the job on the spot,” Grace recalled.

“The thing he really liked about (me) – he liked the fact that I was very religious. I am quite a Christian, but I’m a LGBTQI Christian.”

When Grace tendered their resignation nine months later, things took another bizarre turn.

“Alan was a manipulative boss,” Grace said.

“He would try to use your religion to manipulate you. That’s what he did when I resigned.

“He said ‘you’re a Christian, don't you want to share this gospel with the rest of the world?’

“I didn’t want a bar of it, I told him to get lost.”

Mary – who signed off her investor updates with “God bless you” – said: “Alan and I are both Christians and we have tried to live our lives accordingly in honesty.

“This never interfered with our work, it just meant that we were honest.”

Nut job or messiah?

Investors are still unsure if Alan Metcalfe was a mastermind or a con artist. But one thing is certain – he was a good salesman.

“He was pretty sure of himself that what he had in hand was gold,” Mr Wijnveen recalled. “He was very convincing.”

Others also had ringing endorsements, pointing to an almost mystical power to part them from their money.

“I think he was quite intelligent,” Michael Blake said. “My wife thought I had Stockholm syndrome. Now I know he played me.”

David Gorman is more of a cynic about Alan.

“Some people think he’s a genius with a hopeless business plan, a control freak. It used to do everyone’s head in,” he said.

“I went in to so many meetings, he used to talk dribble. He was saying how he’d found a special code, that should have been ringing alarm bells.

“There’s still a lot of people that believe in his product, it’s strange.”

One of the true believers is Dr Sean Eastwood, who told news.com.au “I looked at this and said ‘this is genius’”.

“I tried to enrol in a PhD to validate this work. They said you can’t because there’s no pre-existing science.”

Dr Eastwood, a chiropractor, was suffering from a bad back and was researching the way stress is stored in the body, which he believes could manifest into physical symptoms like pain.  

When he came across Alan’s theories on Universal Logic, he thought it could be applied to his own discipline. 

“From Alan’s work, I realised AI is a program for optimal human thought," he said. "Computers don’t have emotions or store unhealthy beliefs physically."

He has since gone on to improve the pain in his back and said he had dedicated his life on the “unifying theory of science between human health and computing”, and has also written a book on the subject, inspired by Alan Metcalfe.

But doubts started to slither in when Alan died in 2017 and his wife Mary took over.

Her strategy to salvage Safe Worlds was to sell the licence and take it to market, which was outlined in an email five days after his death.

“Alan is now in a better place with his God and is now giving us his guidance from above,” she wrote.

“The finest celebration of his legacy, Is (sic) that all of us who can share now pledge to liberate this gift to benefit humanity.”

For the next several years, shareholders received sporadic email updates about her negotiations with an Irish man named John Duff, who was supposedly going to buy the Safe Worlds technology for US$2.25 billion (A$3.32 billion).

It was a staggering amount of money. The deal eventually collapsed.

“We had a contract, subject to finance, with John Duff for US$2.25 billion to buy the World License and as part of that to advance the funds to update the system,” Mary told news.com.au.

“Unfortunately the contract fell through.”

She claimed both herself and Alan thought John Duff seemed “genuine” and said the experience has made her decide to actively keep shareholders in the dark about future bids for the company.

“Mr Duff subsequently suffered a tragedy in that his son died and then he caught Covid,” she claimed.

“Unfortunately, some of our shareholders criticised him to such a degree that he decided to wipe his hands of further involvement in the corporation.

“Since then, I have had a blanket rule that until a purchaser is close to completion, I cannot reveal his or her name and details. This seems to be the most sensible rule.”

Mr Wijnveen has sent Mary legal letters demanding his money be returned, but she has refused on the basis she can’t preference some shareholders over others.

“Today, in 2023, 10 years after the initial investment, we still occasionally get an email with an update but are all convinced that it was all one big fraud,” Mr Wijnveen said.

In response, Mary said: “Alan and I were never fraudsters or scam artists. We have never been found to have engaged in fraud or charged with that.”

Although Alan’s death was a shock to some, it could not be considered untimely.

By all accounts, he was incredibly overweight and 70 years old when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

And yet his larger-than-life presence continued to haunt the minds of investors – literally.

Some were convinced he wasn’t really dead.

“A few people said he’s not dead, he’s still alive. They bandied that around,” Mr Gorman said.

Shortly after Alan’s death, the corporate regulator, ASIC, publicly reprimanded Safe Worlds for offering securities to Australian investors without disclosure documents as required under the Corporations Act, and also for failing to register as a foreign company.

ASIC is not actively investigating the company, as it does not deal with investor disputes and capital raising schemes.

In order to recoup funds, investors has been advised by ASIC to take legal action to wind the company up into liquidation. But as Safe Worlds is non-operational and Mary has admitted it has run out of funds, their chances of recovery appear non-existent.

“Everyone’s living in hope that a miracle will happen,” Mr Blake said.

Alan’s unwavering faith, both in his god and his idea, remained until the end.

It begs the question; if you believe in something hard enough, does that make it real? Was the project, at best, a delusion? At worst, a fraud? If he hadn’t died, would it have been bigger than Google?

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Perhaps he was a genius, or maybe he was a lunatic, or a scammer. Or a bit of everything?

Only Alan Metcalfe knows for sure.

alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au

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