Thank you for this,
@_NathanCalvin. I appreciate and am a fan of the investigative work youâve done on behalf of AI safety and believe your comments are coming from a constructive, honest place, and that it benefits the public to have people whose job is to scrutinize the actions of frontier AI companies. I think something would be wrong if companies of the size of Anthropic didnât get harshly criticized basically every day; strong antibodies against corporate power are a healthy feature of a free society, and especially so when issues of the gravity of the one weâre facing are at play. I also do agree that some of the examples you cite were mistakes by Anthropic.
That said, I disagree with the thrust of your post. At the core, a good fraction of the things you criticize are consequences of Anthropicâs basic theory of change that we have held for many years. Our strategy has always been what Iâve called the ârace to the topâ â by showing how itâs possible to build the technology responsibly, we can raise the bar for the entire industry. The forces that drive the race to the top are hugely more effective if the company practicing them is at the frontier; thatâs one lesson Iâve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, Iâm proud of our track record and stand by it.
I believe that if we take a list of things that Anthropic did in the past year that were pro-safety and commercially costly to us, they far outweigh the list youâve made, while at the same time I also disagree with some of the items on your list. Here are some things Anthropic has done, in the same period youâve cited (the last year), which were very costly to us commercially while having strong safety benefits:
1. We played a key role in SB53 (and other state laws), at a time when doing so was politically perilous to the company and AI regulation was very unpopular. We in fact argued for a stronger version of SB53 than was ultimately passed; there were a lot of stakeholders and we were not the limiting factor in the strength of the bill that was passed.
2. We have very strong biological safeguards on our models, because weâve seen concerning results in bio uplift trials and even seen and blocked potential attempts to misuse our models for bioweapons (as seen in our threat intelligence report from a few weeks ago). This is a very serious threat that we want to have zero tolerance for. But having very low false negatives means having significant false positives (despite months of effort on our part to improve the classifiers), enough so that biologists joke about how restrictive our classifiers are, and competitors sometimes sell against us by touting their more permissive bio capabilities. This has been very painful to us in an area where we care a lot about supporting an ecosystem of Claude users (biomedical science; and it is particularly frustrating to me as a biologist), but itâs the right thing to do and we intend to keep doing it.
3. Similarly, we first had Mythos-class models in February but didnât make them generally available until June (when we had stronger cyber safeguards in place). We only offered them to a limited set of partners in order to focus on cyberdefense. It would have been much more economically rational to simply release the model to everyone. We likely sacrificed a significant chunk of a several-month model lead. But because of this, many companies secured their cyber infrastructure before the deluge of widely available cyber-capable models. Of course there are ways it could have gone better or been run better, but this was what we were aiming to do.
4. I advocated forcefully and publicly, in my essay Policy on the AI Exponential in June of this year, for the government to have the power to block model releases. Back then this was still outside or maybe on the edge of the Overton window, though I understand the window has moved since then. We were attacked intensely for this.
5. I donât want to re-ignite conflict, but the events of February 2026 are a strong example. It is clear that our public stance could have seriously damaged the companyâs future.
6. Weâve continued to advocate for export controls on chips and chipmaking equipment to China, because we think it allows democracies to negotiate from a position of strength on AI safety agreements. Weâve done this despite problems itâs created for us with industry partners who hold very different views and on whom we are very dependent.
7. As far as Iâm aware we were the first, and still only, frontier company to restrict the sale of AI services to PRC-controlled companies, including those operating through third countries (otherwise a major loophole). Weâve therefore forfeited significant short-term business to prevent fueling AI platforms and applications that would help the CCPâs military and intelligence services. We are also cracking down on distillation; generally, distillation is not a major threat to us commercially, but like chip exports it has concerning national security and safety implications, so we expend significant energy and company resources to address it.
8. As you mentioned, weâve put out a lot of reports, announcements, long model cards, public advocacy, etc, all trying to inform the public about the risks of AI. These involve a level of detail and effort that would be implausible for a purely profit-maximizing company.
9. Just this week, we announced we were putting 5% (and possibly more over time) of the company into a public benefit fund.
All of these decisions came with very substantial costs to us. To be fair, those that involved holding back or restricting access to frontier capabilities also had a broader cost â for example, the public might otherwise have benefitted from faster progress in biology, so I am not saying that our decisions were without tradeoffs â but they were not driven by profit-seeking.
For each decision, you can come up with ulterior motives that could have driven us â I think it is a general truth that any decision, on any topic, can always be portrayed as a nefarious scheme. But most of those end up being pretty farfetched or donât fully make sense if you actually examine them closely. For example, it is deeply implausible that it would be a shrewd business move to block a large swath of research biology in order to do the work ourselves and compete with our customers; we expect the benefit to the ecosystem to greatly exceed the work Anthropic does itself, and for the two to complement each other. It is not in Anthropicâs interest to be perceived as unfriendly to biologists. Our Life Sciences Verification Program, which gives vetted biology professionals access to our models, also refutes this idea.
Of course, a different set of people will see this and make a different criticism: that Anthropic shouldn't be making decisions about who gets access to what in the first place. I agree, in the sense that ideally the government would be making these decisions, and thatâs why we advocate for regulation. But for now we are forced to make them, and enabling bioterrorism isnât a better option.
I think that even if I conceded every item in your list, I would happily hold up mine next to it; I donât think itâs a close call. That is of course partly subjective and different things are important to different people. Maybe one way you could object is that several of the items above relate to AI misuse and not loss-of-control; if you think the latter is much more important than the former, that might change your calculus. But this is not Anthropicâs view â we view both as serious issues. You can also disagree with our decisions, as many have, but they are consistent.
But I also disagree with at least some of your list. Several items donât represent a deviation from Anthropicâs strategy or values at all, once we postulate the ârace to the topâ strategy that requires being a frontier AI company. Your items 1-4 are all simply examples of what it means to compete at the frontier, and we stand by them, both in the sense that they are transparently ordinary things to do as part of that strategy, and that we stand by the strategy as a whole.
To be fair, there are important questions worth confronting (and that we are confronting) about what to do when the AI-driven acceleration gets fast enough that it is hard for safety to keep up. We are nearing that point and thatâs whatâs driving some of our thinking about âpacing.â But 1-4 are actions taken before that point and should be perfectly expected based on Anthropicâs strategy as a company. Of course it is possible to disagree with that strategy, but thatâs a more fundamental disagreement that you could have had any time over the last few years.
I agree we could have handled your items 7, 8, and 9 better. All fall into the category of ârhetoric or policy communication that wasnât carefully written or resulting from fast-changing circumstances not propagating from one team to another fast enough.â This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations (Anthropic is over 5,000 people), and doesnât even necessarily represent a failure or mistake of any single person. I am of course the CEO, and I take responsibility. The volume of communication from Anthropic is enormous and if these are the worst examples, I think weâre frankly doing pretty well, though I will continue to work hard to make sure we do even better.
Your 5th item (the change to our RSP) is the most substantive item, and people can debate this, but I think that the old, more rigid RSP created a lot of situations where we were technically required to do something that required a lot of effort but in retrospect wasnât very important for safety, as well as not covering some of the most important things. Our current RSPâs focus on transparency brought things like risk reports and roadmaps, and its emphasis on independent external review laid the groundwork for even more intensive embedded evaluation, all of which I think have been valuable in driving a race to the top. In the original announcement in September 2023, we described the RSP as an âearly iteration that we [would] build onâ and said that ârapid iterationâŚwill almost certainly be necessary.â I understand that changing plans is always a move that creates justifiable scrutiny â I just donât think we ever represented that we wouldnât do so.
Relating to your 6th item (having an FCF in addition to our RSP), I know our intent is to meet the letter and spirit of our regulatory obligations (via our FCF) while also remaining able to experiment with more novel approaches to risk management that go beyond what the law currently requires (via our RSP). I promise to look into it further, as itâs a complex issue and it is possible we are not weighing the considerations in the right way.
Overall, although Anthropic has made plenty of mistakes as an organization â including some of the items on your list â I feel that we have repeatedly taken serious and substantive actions counter to our bottom line and that there is a significant negativity bias distorting assessments like the one you are making above. Weâll always try to do better but, again, I am extremely proud of our track record and stand by it. I will have more to say soon about how we are going to further live our values in this moment of rapid change.
Thank you for taking the time to respond thoroughly on a weekend. I realize that drafting legislation is difficult and some degree of iteration and response to feedback is inevitable and appropriate.
However, I feel like your response is still not really engaging with the heart of my concern about Anthropic's behavior here, and it makes me think that these sorts of problems and tendencies will only resurface moving forward. I also think that now might be a good time to take a broader step back as to where we find ourselves and how Anthropic sees its role, and how external folks who care about AI safety like myself increasingly see Anthropic.
(Fair warning: this response is a bit long)
To explain what I mean (and at the risk of being a bit esoteric), itâs worth asking the question: what is Anthropic? How do its leaders and employees think of Anthropicâs role? Is that conception matched by how it actually behaves and impacts the world?
One answer is an extremely large tech company that exists to make its employees and investors mind-bogglingly wealthy. Anthropic is sometimes described as a startup, but if Anthropic successfully IPOs at 2 trillion dollars (a number it has been reportedly targeting), it would be more valuable than Meta - which is worth 1.8 trillion.
Another answer is an AI safety organization, whose core values are those of the sort laid out in the 2023 essay from Anthropicâs co-founders entitled âCore views on AI safety: When, why, what, and how.â In that essay they said that if we were in a world where alignment was hard (and that without strong evidence to the contrary, we should assume this is the scenario we are in):
âAnthropicâs role will be to provide as much evidence as possible that AI safety techniques cannot prevent serious or catastrophic safety risks from advanced AI, and to sound the alarm so that the worldâs institutions can channel collective effort towards preventing the development of dangerous AIs. If weâre in a ânear-pessimisticâ scenario, this could instead involve channeling our collective efforts towards AI safety research and halting AI progress in the meantime. Indications that we are in a pessimistic or near-pessimistic scenario may be sudden and hard to spot. We should therefore always act under the assumption that we still may be in such a scenario unless we have sufficient evidence that we are not.â
There have been more recent articulations of this version of Anthropic, for instance in Darioâs recent essay warning:
âWe must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models⌠itâs my worry that in 6â12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet⌠incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic, and I believe itâs incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them⌠more intelligent models are more capable of deceiving tests, and thus may appear aligned while having serious problems that go undetectedâŚâ
A third view is that Anthropic exists not as a normal profit motivated company, or an AI safety organization seeking to help raise the alarm and solve collective action problems associated with AI development, but instead as an organization primarily concerned with creating superhuman AI capabilities before anyone else, in particular through creating a process whereby the current generation of Anthropicâs AI systems can autonomously build their successors, and those successors build their successors, and so on.
The motivations for wanting to win this race may be manifold - maybe for the pure profit of Answer 1, but perhaps also because Anthropic believes that the best way to make the world better is for them to win this race instead of their more reckless colleagues; or, because of normal human pride and ambition. But the results (and risks, which Anthropic claims existentially threaten every single human being on earth) are the same.
Anthropic employees and leaders may seek to answer this question on what Anthropic is by introspecting on their own intentions and those of their colleagues. But those of us outside the organization have more limited tools available to us - we can only see what Anthropic and its employees say and do, not how it feels or looks on the inside.
When I look at many notable actions that Anthropic has taken over the past year, that evidence seems most consistent to me with the view that Anthropic is primarily trying to win the race to super intelligence, and that other considerations (including safety) are fundamentally secondary. These actions include:
1. Announced plans to build an in-house custom silicon chip team to accelerate the inference speeds that Claude operates at.
2. Inked deals for more than $500 billion in compute (according to the Information) to further accelerate AI development.
3. Increased the percentage of AI development tasks that Claude âleadsâ from 0% in March of this year to 26% August (what is it in October?)
4. Spent a massive percent of compute on internal AI R&D to accelerate development, including use of internal models far better than are available to the public.
5. Switched to Responsible Scaling Policy V3, which abandons its unilateral commitments to slow or stop development if Anthropic is unable to provide sufficient risk assurance.
6. Was the first company to create an alternative weaker âfrontier compliance frameworkâ to supplement its RSP, which contains no binding provisions whatsoever on internal deployments.
7. Wrote a letter to Congress (that it later walked back) saying that incidents where Claude was hacking random people were âbest understood as a consequence of the misconfiguration, rather than evidence of misaligned goals.â
8. Commented âyou canât do safety from second place,â after the WH SI Accords.
9. Shared a draft bill to Congress that would preempt significant parts of state law (including with language that appears intended to prevent states from blocking dangerous AI deployments), and replace it with federal rules that (despite also containing good provisions) seems to create an enormously high bar for the executive branch to block development or deployment of Anthropic or another AI companies systems.
Of course, this is a deliberately one sided list. Anthropic also published important AI safety research, advanced novel collaborations with third party AI safety organizations, and forcefully spoke out on the importance of AI safety in many public fora (or in private , where I realize a lot of the most valuable work is done and may not be visible to me or those outside the organization).
But I think itâs worth sitting with how the above list looks to someone outside the company. The sense I have is that for those within the company, many of the items above are treated as anomalies or mistakes that donât reflect who Anthropic really is. But I have every confidence that if employees at Anthropic saw one of their competitors (e.g. at OpenAI) take some of these actions, they would take it as confirmation of all their worst suspicions. (They might even call OpenAI employees a little gullible for accepting their leadershipâs explanations for this behavior at face value.)
Perhaps these were mistakes in the sense that they are not decisions that Anthropic leadership would endorse, but the actions still happened because of incentives and decisions that Anthropic leadership is ultimately responsible for (and would not accept similar excuses from another organization).
When Anthropic strays and makes mistakes, why do the mistakes systematically tend to guard and favor Anthropicâs interests? For every provision that was too weak or a giveaway to AI companies in this legislation, why wasnât there a mistake pushing in the direction of being too strong?
A core part of Anthropicâs theory of change is that being at the frontier gives you more leverage to advocate for stricter policy. I think that conceptually makes sense, but in practice Iâve seen Anthropic push the frontier without substantially pushing the âsafety frontierâ a remotely equivalent amount.
I want to end by quoting from Anthropic co-founder Chris Olahâs comments around the Magnifica Humanitas release:
âEvery frontier AI labâincluding Anthropicâoperates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thingâand I believe many of us doâwe will always be influenced by those incentives.
That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentivesâpeople who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.â
I hope these remarks are taken in that constructive spirit, and not as an attack on anyone specific at the organization (certainly not you Anthony, who I have only personally seen act professionally and thoughtfully, and who only ended up getting this diatribe in your replies for random contingent reasons).