<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying they\u2019re necessarily wrong about any of this. (That\u2019s for another day.) But in a world where nobody knows what\u2019s coming, companies like Anthropic get to fill the vacuum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth taking a moment to ask: What is Anthropic?<\/strong> It might sound like a starter question on a family quiz show, but it\u2019s far harder to answer than you might think.<\/p>\n The question has been on my mind since reading an exchange on X last week kicked off by Nathan Calvin, who is chief strategy officer at Encode AI, an organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for regulation. Calvin was unhappy about the legislation that Anthropic proposed in a draft bill it circulated in secret to US lawmakers (which was then leaked).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Anthropic wants to be seen as the good guy, Calvin said. But why should we trust it? \u201cWhat is Anthropic?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s one answer: Anthropic is a company whose IPO values it at more than $1.5 trillion, netting its cofounders, including Clark and Olah, vast wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Anthropic has always insisted it is more than that. As Calvin noted: Anthropic might instead be considered an AI safety organization focused on developing powerful technology that is reliable and (almost) risk-free. Or it might be considered a group of people hell-bent on creating a technology with superhuman capabilities before anyone else\u2014maybe because they believe they\u2019re the most responsible people to do so, or maybe because of their egos.<\/p>\n In fact, Anthropic is all of these things.<\/strong> As CEO Dario Amodei put it in a reply to Calvin\u2019s post: \u201cOur strategy has always been what I\u2019ve called the \u2018race to the top\u2019\u2014by showing how it\u2019s 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; that\u2019s one lesson I\u2019ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I\u2019m proud of our track record and stand by it.\u201d<\/p>\n Amodei makes it sound as if he\u2019s got it all tied up, but playing multiple roles is hard. There are huge tensions between the priorities of an AI safety organization and a profit-driven megacorp, for example. (Amodei admits in his post that he has made mistakes.)<\/p>\n Ultimately, the stories Anthropic tells itself should help us understand the stories it tells us. They should help us figure out how much to trust it to self-regulate or whether we should be forcing it to give external safety testers access to its models on our terms rather than theirs. They should help us give it the benefit of the doubt (or not) when what looks like a self-serving piece of legislation comes to light.<\/p>\n But I think the stories reveal a multiheaded hydra. Anthropic is many things to many people, and I\u2019m not sure that makes it more trustworthy. In many ways, a good old-fashioned technology company\u2014without the science fiction role-play, without the woo-woo\u2014would be far easier to read.