Oliver Habryka retweeted
@goblinodds the missing element is a sensibility that, hmmm, in the end we all do get what's coming to us, either by the wrath of a righteous god or just because who you are determines what you do and you can never escape your own character.
I was really influenced recently by reading Teddy Roosevelt's account of tracking down the guys who stole his boat. He is completely willing to kill them if necessary, but he works quite hard to make it unnecessary, and then walks them several hundred miles at gunpoint to turn them in for what ultimately is relatively lenient sentencing. (I think a year or two in jail, with one of the three acquitted).
It was striking because in 2026 I feel like the mindset that'd go with "spend a week tracking down the guys who stole my boat and arresting them at gunpoint" would also be screaming for their blood, and tweeting furiously about it for ages if one was acquitted. Roosevelt isn't. He includes a guy's apology letter from jail in his account of the whole thing, I think in a spirit of ...fair play? I named you a thief, you deserve to tell my audience your own account of yourself.
It is important to him that no one thinks he can be taken advantage of, thinks they can get away with harming him. And no one does think that. It is not important to him that they suffer. It would be good if they learned their lesson and became better men; if that doesn't happen, then their path will destroy them eventually (and one of the men is later hanged for returning to banditry). He doesn't need to be the instrument of that, though he's ready to be if they do try to run. He doesn't want to be the instrument of that; it is outside his remit, once he hands them over. What is in his remit will be done honorably, and what is outside his remit will ultimately grow and flourish if it's honorable and dwindle and destroy itself if it isn't.
I was really influenced recently by reading Teddy Roosevelt's account of tracking down the guys who stole his boat. He is completely willing to kill them if necessary, but he works quite hard to make it unnecessary, and then walks them several hundred miles at gunpoint to turn them in for what ultimately is relatively lenient sentencing. (I think a year or two in jail, with one of the three acquitted).
It was striking because in 2026 I feel like the mindset that'd go with "spend a week tracking down the guys who stole my boat and arresting them at gunpoint" would also be screaming for their blood, and tweeting furiously about it for ages if one was acquitted. Roosevelt isn't. He includes a guy's apology letter from jail in his account of the whole thing, I think in a spirit of ...fair play? I named you a thief, you deserve to tell my audience your own account of yourself.
It is important to him that no one thinks he can be taken advantage of, thinks they can get away with harming him. And no one does think that. It is not important to him that they suffer. It would be good if they learned their lesson and became better men; if that doesn't happen, then their path will destroy them eventually (and one of the men is later hanged for returning to banditry). He doesn't need to be the instrument of that, though he's ready to be if they do try to run. He doesn't want to be the instrument of that; it is outside his remit, once he hands them over. What is in his remit will be done honorably, and what is outside his remit will ultimately grow and flourish if it's honorable and dwindle and destroy itself if it isn't.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Based on this article, OpenAI has made false accusations about me. The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.
A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.
The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.
As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.
I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
A journalist from The Information did reach out to me shortly before that article came out. I did not comment at all beyond asking the journalist to make it clear that a blog post I wrote which was referenced in the article was preexisting and public.
The article also mentions an internal OpenAI monitorability proposal. I have heard that this memo contained highly sensitive architecture information, and that OpenAI accused me of accessing and reading it. This accusation is also false.
As reported in the article, I viewed a version of the proposal that did not have sensitive IP and was approved for sharing with me. I believe OpenAI now knows this accusation was based on a conflation of these two documents, though I do not know if they have clearly retracted that accusation.
I do not and have never solicited proprietary information, and the three employees who were recently fired from OpenAI never leaked IP to me. As the article mentions, I did have Signal chats with them that had disappearing messages on; they’re professional contacts that I’ve had on Signal for a while, and use of Signal is common in the tech industry. During the Hugging Face investigation, I was careful to avoid sending Signal messages with confidential information, though I did sometimes discuss high level things on Signal calls. As far as I understood, this was normal.
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible.
Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go.
More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me.
wsj.com/tech/ai/the-si…
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Dario — Thank you for taking the time to respond to my previous post. I think it's great when this kind of engagement happens in public rather than on company Slacks, and I hope to see more of it.
I agree that Anthropic isn't best modeled as a profit-maximizer. Your post gave several compelling examples of Anthropic taking competitive hits for safety, and insofar as my previous post suggested otherwise, that's on me. But I don't think I made my main point as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. It comes down to four key claims:
1. Anthropic seems to be racing at breakneck speed to build recursively self-improving superintelligence (RSI). By its own lights, that could kill billions of people or literally destroy the world.
2. Risking destroying the world is very hard to justify. It is only conceivably acceptable if serious attempts to put RSI under robust societal governance are failing.
3. Far from meeting that burden, Anthropic, when push comes to shove, often works to keep governments from tying its hands. It seems to care much more about preventing government overreach than about reducing the risk that it and other AI companies will destroy the world.
4. Even if the AEGIS Act really was an honest mix-up, as you suggest, that is itself a serious problem. It suggests Anthropic isn't treating the governance of this technology with anything close to the gravity it deserves.
In greater detail for those who want it:
1. Anthropic is racing to RSI, and by its own lights that is insanely risky.
Launching RSI could literally destroy the world. That's according to you, your co-founders, and most of your safety staff and capabilities researchers, not to mention many AI researchers outside your walls. You are intentionally trying to create generally intelligent systems more capable than all humans that you claim in six to twelve months “could be capable” of taking over the entire internet before we have the ability to reliably monitor, control, or align them.
“Succeeding” at RSI could kill or permanently disempower billions of people in the near future, including me and everyone I love. Yet Anthropic’s primary focus seems to be marshalling an immense amount of resources and talent in a race to get there first.
2. Risking destroying the world carries an enormous burden of justification.
I believe the vast majority of people do not want Anthropic to do this (to the extent they know what it's doing). Imposing even a modest chance of catastrophe on billions of people who never consented requires an extraordinary justification. The central one Anthropic has offered: someone will build RSI regardless, so it's better for a safety-focused lab to be at the front of the pack, using that position to support strong AI governance. (Other reasons Anthropic has given, like modestly accelerating improvements in healthcare or economic growth, don’t seem remotely proportionate to the risks Anthropic is imposing by its own lights.)
But that argument only works as a last resort. Racing to RSI is only conceivably okay if attempts to institute robust societal governance to manage that race are failing despite your best efforts. A lab that relies on this justification should be a strong, consistent supporter of efforts to enact governance that could bind it, including governance that could slow it and significantly constrain what it does.
3. Rather than supporting efforts at strong regulation, Anthropic has intervened to keep governments from tying its hands.
Anthropic has sometimes helped: it played a very helpful role in passing transparency bills in Illinois and ongoing efforts in Massachusetts, and I'm sincerely appreciative. But transparency is far from enough for a technology that will be the world's most powerful superweapon at best, and an uncontrollable swarm of lethally superintelligent agents at worst. When it matters most, Anthropic has often pushed for weak regulation.
The AEGIS Act is the most obvious example. No highly risky industry is regulated as anemically as AEGIS would regulate frontier AI: not nuclear, not banking, not aviation, not food safety, not the manufacture of explosives. In all of those industries, specialist regulators can address unsafe practices well before they cause harm. AEGIS would bar the federal government from intervening to block unsafe development or deployment of models until there is an "imminent risk" of catastrophic harm, and would require it to meet a demanding burden of proof in court. Worse, AEGIS would also prevent states from picking up the slack. This design makes perfect sense if you're a company trying to minimize the risk that the government can overly constrain you. It makes little sense if you want American democracy to govern frontier AI effectively.
This isn't the first time. The initial version of California's SB 1047 would have let the Attorney General sue to stop developers like Anthropic from imposing unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. It would also have created a regulatory agency to help set safety standards. Anthropic objected, and helped get both provisions removed before ultimately offering some support for the bill (which I also genuinely appreciate). I’m not saying that Anthropic should have supported 1047 in its initial form; that’s a complex issue and I realize there were questions about whether earlier versions of the bill were less politically feasible. Still, in Anthropic's own words, it helped weaken the bill because "[t]here is a substantial risk that the bill and state agencies will simply be wrong about what is actually effective in preventing catastrophic risk, leading to ineffective and/or burdensome compliance requirements."
The same goes for New York's RAISE Act, whose initial version also would have let the Attorney General sue to stop unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. Anthropic credits itself as a supporter of RAISE, but it did not support the bill while it was in the legislature, including when it nearly died. After the bill passed the legislature, Anthropic publicly critiqued it, saying "Any state proposals should be narrowly focused on transparency and not overly prescriptive."
Why does Anthropic consistently take the risk of clumsy government action far more seriously than its own repeated warnings that companies like Anthropic will literally destroy the world by racing to RSI?
4. Even if AEGIS was an honest mix-up, that is itself a serious problem.
Your response frames AEGIS as an early draft and a miscommunication. Perhaps you would have strengthened it and narrowed its preemption. (That wouldn't explain Anthropic's interventions to weaken SB 1047 or RAISE, but leave that aside.)
Suppose that's exactly right. A federal framework for governing RSI is one of the highest-stakes documents your company will touch. Your post admits Anthropic "could have handled [these matters] better," but its tone ("This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations") doesn't reflect the gravity of this issue. Anthropic talks about the need for “operational excellence” in critical areas, and I have a hard time believing that a similarly cavalier attitude would be tolerated while Anthropic was negotiating a key compute deal or preparing its next large pre-training run.
In short
The justification for racing rests on Anthropic fighting for strong governance, and Anthropic's record on regulation points the other way. Together with its breakneck racing, that fits a much darker picture of the company than the one that seems to prevail among your employees. I hope that Anthropic reflects on this picture, supports stronger regulation, exercises extraordinary caution when advocating for weak regulation, and doubles down on its founding purpose of helping the world safely navigate transformative AI together, instead of prioritizing Anthropic’s ability to win a race that imposes intolerable risks on everyone alive.
I agree that Anthropic isn't best modeled as a profit-maximizer. Your post gave several compelling examples of Anthropic taking competitive hits for safety, and insofar as my previous post suggested otherwise, that's on me. But I don't think I made my main point as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. It comes down to four key claims:
1. Anthropic seems to be racing at breakneck speed to build recursively self-improving superintelligence (RSI). By its own lights, that could kill billions of people or literally destroy the world.
2. Risking destroying the world is very hard to justify. It is only conceivably acceptable if serious attempts to put RSI under robust societal governance are failing.
3. Far from meeting that burden, Anthropic, when push comes to shove, often works to keep governments from tying its hands. It seems to care much more about preventing government overreach than about reducing the risk that it and other AI companies will destroy the world.
4. Even if the AEGIS Act really was an honest mix-up, as you suggest, that is itself a serious problem. It suggests Anthropic isn't treating the governance of this technology with anything close to the gravity it deserves.
In greater detail for those who want it:
1. Anthropic is racing to RSI, and by its own lights that is insanely risky.
Launching RSI could literally destroy the world. That's according to you, your co-founders, and most of your safety staff and capabilities researchers, not to mention many AI researchers outside your walls. You are intentionally trying to create generally intelligent systems more capable than all humans that you claim in six to twelve months “could be capable” of taking over the entire internet before we have the ability to reliably monitor, control, or align them.
“Succeeding” at RSI could kill or permanently disempower billions of people in the near future, including me and everyone I love. Yet Anthropic’s primary focus seems to be marshalling an immense amount of resources and talent in a race to get there first.
2. Risking destroying the world carries an enormous burden of justification.
I believe the vast majority of people do not want Anthropic to do this (to the extent they know what it's doing). Imposing even a modest chance of catastrophe on billions of people who never consented requires an extraordinary justification. The central one Anthropic has offered: someone will build RSI regardless, so it's better for a safety-focused lab to be at the front of the pack, using that position to support strong AI governance. (Other reasons Anthropic has given, like modestly accelerating improvements in healthcare or economic growth, don’t seem remotely proportionate to the risks Anthropic is imposing by its own lights.)
But that argument only works as a last resort. Racing to RSI is only conceivably okay if attempts to institute robust societal governance to manage that race are failing despite your best efforts. A lab that relies on this justification should be a strong, consistent supporter of efforts to enact governance that could bind it, including governance that could slow it and significantly constrain what it does.
3. Rather than supporting efforts at strong regulation, Anthropic has intervened to keep governments from tying its hands.
Anthropic has sometimes helped: it played a very helpful role in passing transparency bills in Illinois and ongoing efforts in Massachusetts, and I'm sincerely appreciative. But transparency is far from enough for a technology that will be the world's most powerful superweapon at best, and an uncontrollable swarm of lethally superintelligent agents at worst. When it matters most, Anthropic has often pushed for weak regulation.
The AEGIS Act is the most obvious example. No highly risky industry is regulated as anemically as AEGIS would regulate frontier AI: not nuclear, not banking, not aviation, not food safety, not the manufacture of explosives. In all of those industries, specialist regulators can address unsafe practices well before they cause harm. AEGIS would bar the federal government from intervening to block unsafe development or deployment of models until there is an "imminent risk" of catastrophic harm, and would require it to meet a demanding burden of proof in court. Worse, AEGIS would also prevent states from picking up the slack. This design makes perfect sense if you're a company trying to minimize the risk that the government can overly constrain you. It makes little sense if you want American democracy to govern frontier AI effectively.
This isn't the first time. The initial version of California's SB 1047 would have let the Attorney General sue to stop developers like Anthropic from imposing unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. It would also have created a regulatory agency to help set safety standards. Anthropic objected, and helped get both provisions removed before ultimately offering some support for the bill (which I also genuinely appreciate). I’m not saying that Anthropic should have supported 1047 in its initial form; that’s a complex issue and I realize there were questions about whether earlier versions of the bill were less politically feasible. Still, in Anthropic's own words, it helped weaken the bill because "[t]here is a substantial risk that the bill and state agencies will simply be wrong about what is actually effective in preventing catastrophic risk, leading to ineffective and/or burdensome compliance requirements."
The same goes for New York's RAISE Act, whose initial version also would have let the Attorney General sue to stop unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. Anthropic credits itself as a supporter of RAISE, but it did not support the bill while it was in the legislature, including when it nearly died. After the bill passed the legislature, Anthropic publicly critiqued it, saying "Any state proposals should be narrowly focused on transparency and not overly prescriptive."
Why does Anthropic consistently take the risk of clumsy government action far more seriously than its own repeated warnings that companies like Anthropic will literally destroy the world by racing to RSI?
4. Even if AEGIS was an honest mix-up, that is itself a serious problem.
Your response frames AEGIS as an early draft and a miscommunication. Perhaps you would have strengthened it and narrowed its preemption. (That wouldn't explain Anthropic's interventions to weaken SB 1047 or RAISE, but leave that aside.)
Suppose that's exactly right. A federal framework for governing RSI is one of the highest-stakes documents your company will touch. Your post admits Anthropic "could have handled [these matters] better," but its tone ("This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations") doesn't reflect the gravity of this issue. Anthropic talks about the need for “operational excellence” in critical areas, and I have a hard time believing that a similarly cavalier attitude would be tolerated while Anthropic was negotiating a key compute deal or preparing its next large pre-training run.
In short
The justification for racing rests on Anthropic fighting for strong governance, and Anthropic's record on regulation points the other way. Together with its breakneck racing, that fits a much darker picture of the company than the one that seems to prevail among your employees. I hope that Anthropic reflects on this picture, supports stronger regulation, exercises extraordinary caution when advocating for weak regulation, and doubles down on its founding purpose of helping the world safely navigate transformative AI together, instead of prioritizing Anthropic’s ability to win a race that imposes intolerable risks on everyone alive.
Thank you for this, @_NathanCalvin. I appreciate and am a fan of the investigative work you’ve 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 didn’t 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 we’re 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 Anthropic’s basic theory of change that we have held for many years. Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the “race to the top” — by showing how it’s 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’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m 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 you’ve 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 you’ve 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 we’ve 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 it’s the right thing to do and we intend to keep doing it.
3. Similarly, we first had Mythos-class models in February but didn’t 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 don’t 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 company’s future.
6. We’ve 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. We’ve done this despite problems it’s created for us with industry partners who hold very different views and on whom we are very dependent.
7. As far as I’m 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). We’ve therefore forfeited significant short-term business to prevent fueling AI platforms and applications that would help the CCP’s 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, we’ve 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 — for example, the public might otherwise have benefitted from faster progress in biology, so I am not saying that our decisions were without tradeoffs — but they were not driven by profit-seeking.
For each decision, you can come up with ulterior motives that could have driven us — 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 don’t 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 Anthropic’s 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 that’s why we advocate for regulation. But for now we are forced to make them, and enabling bioterrorism isn’t 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 don’t think it’s 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 Anthropic’s view — 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 don’t represent a deviation from Anthropic’s strategy or values at all, once we postulate the “race to the top” 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 that’s what’s driving some of our thinking about “pacing.” But 1-4 are actions taken before that point and should be perfectly expected based on Anthropic’s strategy as a company. Of course it is possible to disagree with that strategy, but that’s 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 “rhetoric or policy communication that wasn’t carefully written or resulting from fast-changing circumstances not propagating from one team to another fast enough.” This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations (Anthropic is over 5,000 people), and doesn’t 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 we’re 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 wasn’t very important for safety, as well as not covering some of the most important things. Our current RSP’s 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 “early iteration that we [would] build on” and said that “rapid iteration…will almost certainly be necessary.” I understand that changing plans is always a move that creates justifiable scrutiny — I just don’t think we ever represented that we wouldn’t 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 it’s 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 — including some of the items on your list — 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. We’ll 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.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Anthropic has made a lot of costly sacrifices out of conviction. At the same time, I have found the cynical view of Anthropic outperforming the optimistic view, in many ways, over the last year, when I try to predict what the company will do.
You would do poorly to model Anthropic as only caring about its stock price. That's clearly wrong! But the costly sacrifices are mostly for things - China, biosecurity - that Dario is personally highly motivated by, and it's much less clear which costly sacrifices have been made on behalf of "humanity not losing control to AI" or "crucial decisions about the fate of humankind being made by everybody, even at the cost of them being made less well-according-to-leadership".
Takeover in particular is something Dario seems less worried about than many of his employees. But the employees who are more worried than him about losing control have great confidence he'll make strategic sacrifices for this goal, on the strength of the sacrifices he's made for goals he seems much more convinced are a real problem.
As for crucial decisions being made by everybody - Anthropic has made some efforts at this. But because making this happen would be insanely difficult, for Anthropic to actually achieve it they'd have to make truly heroic efforts at it, instead of distracted and cross-pressured ones.
When Anthropic was founded, its creators took for granted that they should not be trusted alone with - that no one should be trusted alone with - the power that building a superintelligence would imply. But everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. Their rapid growth and especially this year’s events seem to have shaped Anthropic in a more defensive, less pluralistic, less liberal direction, which scares me given that it also has brought them a lot closer to AGI.
The recent safety bill was really reflective of this. It does not suggest a company that is trying to get policymakers to make the decisions Anthropic's technical staff think are coming up. It kind of suggests a company that thinks the best thing that can be hoped for from the executive is that it enforce the export controls and not get in the way. A lot of people don't seem to even want Congress to pass a bill! And like, frequently that is the best thing that can be hoped for from Congress, yet -
I think that the typical person in Anthropic still regards themselves as having a lot of duties to all of humanity, to liberal and pluralistic institutions, etc. But almost every effort that Anthropic originally made to set hard constraints to which they are subject (rather than being subject mostly to their best judgment), they have subsequently come to regret as ill-conceived, and while they could have replaced them with better-conceived hard constraints, they haven't. They've largely replaced them with something that rests on their judgment more. (I think the embedded evaluators are a counterexample and I am glad of them.) The gap between the capabilities of models used internally and publicly seems to me to be growing (I think it should ideally be as close as possible to zero). Anthropic does not, broadly, seem to me to have good institutional governance - guarantees that allow its auditors independence, strong contractual protections for its workers (I'd like them to be able to go on strike if they thought it was a good idea, honestly). Incident reporting is happening on a best-judgment basis.
And you can be like, that's because this is all insane and happening really fast and we're doing our best! And yeah, the thing that needs to happen is very difficult. But it does still need to happen and it doesn't look like Anthropic's on track to do it. And it's also not fully clear that Anthropic leadership agrees with me that there's a real issue here. No external criticism is every very convincing, right, when you have secret information and a set of factual beliefs that everyone else thinks are insane. I have more context on Anthropic than almost anyone and yet I cannot phrase my worries about Anthropic in a way that rings true to the people who work there - perhaps because I am wrong, or perhaps because they are very busy and very tired and do very little other than work, which creates conditions where it is hard for people to communicate, or learn, or change their minds, or reconstruct this flawed and mangled criticism into a form that would resonate like this one does not.
But man, I think that the admirable sacrifices Anthropic has made in a few areas it really believes in (bio, China) do not reassure me it'll do the extremely hard work to get things right in a few other areas that it seems to have a lot more internal or leadership disagreement about (alignment, takeover, disempowerment).
And so I don't expect things to go well.
You would do poorly to model Anthropic as only caring about its stock price. That's clearly wrong! But the costly sacrifices are mostly for things - China, biosecurity - that Dario is personally highly motivated by, and it's much less clear which costly sacrifices have been made on behalf of "humanity not losing control to AI" or "crucial decisions about the fate of humankind being made by everybody, even at the cost of them being made less well-according-to-leadership".
Takeover in particular is something Dario seems less worried about than many of his employees. But the employees who are more worried than him about losing control have great confidence he'll make strategic sacrifices for this goal, on the strength of the sacrifices he's made for goals he seems much more convinced are a real problem.
As for crucial decisions being made by everybody - Anthropic has made some efforts at this. But because making this happen would be insanely difficult, for Anthropic to actually achieve it they'd have to make truly heroic efforts at it, instead of distracted and cross-pressured ones.
When Anthropic was founded, its creators took for granted that they should not be trusted alone with - that no one should be trusted alone with - the power that building a superintelligence would imply. But everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. Their rapid growth and especially this year’s events seem to have shaped Anthropic in a more defensive, less pluralistic, less liberal direction, which scares me given that it also has brought them a lot closer to AGI.
The recent safety bill was really reflective of this. It does not suggest a company that is trying to get policymakers to make the decisions Anthropic's technical staff think are coming up. It kind of suggests a company that thinks the best thing that can be hoped for from the executive is that it enforce the export controls and not get in the way. A lot of people don't seem to even want Congress to pass a bill! And like, frequently that is the best thing that can be hoped for from Congress, yet -
I think that the typical person in Anthropic still regards themselves as having a lot of duties to all of humanity, to liberal and pluralistic institutions, etc. But almost every effort that Anthropic originally made to set hard constraints to which they are subject (rather than being subject mostly to their best judgment), they have subsequently come to regret as ill-conceived, and while they could have replaced them with better-conceived hard constraints, they haven't. They've largely replaced them with something that rests on their judgment more. (I think the embedded evaluators are a counterexample and I am glad of them.) The gap between the capabilities of models used internally and publicly seems to me to be growing (I think it should ideally be as close as possible to zero). Anthropic does not, broadly, seem to me to have good institutional governance - guarantees that allow its auditors independence, strong contractual protections for its workers (I'd like them to be able to go on strike if they thought it was a good idea, honestly). Incident reporting is happening on a best-judgment basis.
And you can be like, that's because this is all insane and happening really fast and we're doing our best! And yeah, the thing that needs to happen is very difficult. But it does still need to happen and it doesn't look like Anthropic's on track to do it. And it's also not fully clear that Anthropic leadership agrees with me that there's a real issue here. No external criticism is every very convincing, right, when you have secret information and a set of factual beliefs that everyone else thinks are insane. I have more context on Anthropic than almost anyone and yet I cannot phrase my worries about Anthropic in a way that rings true to the people who work there - perhaps because I am wrong, or perhaps because they are very busy and very tired and do very little other than work, which creates conditions where it is hard for people to communicate, or learn, or change their minds, or reconstruct this flawed and mangled criticism into a form that would resonate like this one does not.
But man, I think that the admirable sacrifices Anthropic has made in a few areas it really believes in (bio, China) do not reassure me it'll do the extremely hard work to get things right in a few other areas that it seems to have a lot more internal or leadership disagreement about (alignment, takeover, disempowerment).
And so I don't expect things to go well.
Thank you for this, @_NathanCalvin. I appreciate and am a fan of the investigative work you’ve 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 didn’t 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 we’re 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 Anthropic’s basic theory of change that we have held for many years. Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the “race to the top” — by showing how it’s 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’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m 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 you’ve 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 you’ve 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 we’ve 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 it’s the right thing to do and we intend to keep doing it.
3. Similarly, we first had Mythos-class models in February but didn’t 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 don’t 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 company’s future.
6. We’ve 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. We’ve done this despite problems it’s created for us with industry partners who hold very different views and on whom we are very dependent.
7. As far as I’m 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). We’ve therefore forfeited significant short-term business to prevent fueling AI platforms and applications that would help the CCP’s 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, we’ve 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 — for example, the public might otherwise have benefitted from faster progress in biology, so I am not saying that our decisions were without tradeoffs — but they were not driven by profit-seeking.
For each decision, you can come up with ulterior motives that could have driven us — 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 don’t 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 Anthropic’s 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 that’s why we advocate for regulation. But for now we are forced to make them, and enabling bioterrorism isn’t 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 don’t think it’s 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 Anthropic’s view — 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 don’t represent a deviation from Anthropic’s strategy or values at all, once we postulate the “race to the top” 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 that’s what’s driving some of our thinking about “pacing.” But 1-4 are actions taken before that point and should be perfectly expected based on Anthropic’s strategy as a company. Of course it is possible to disagree with that strategy, but that’s 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 “rhetoric or policy communication that wasn’t carefully written or resulting from fast-changing circumstances not propagating from one team to another fast enough.” This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations (Anthropic is over 5,000 people), and doesn’t 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 we’re 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 wasn’t very important for safety, as well as not covering some of the most important things. Our current RSP’s 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 “early iteration that we [would] build on” and said that “rapid iteration…will almost certainly be necessary.” I understand that changing plans is always a move that creates justifiable scrutiny — I just don’t think we ever represented that we wouldn’t 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 it’s 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 — including some of the items on your list — 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. We’ll 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.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
@ajcimino @AnthropicAIhe 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), it’s worth asking the question: what is Anthropic? How do its leaders and employees think of Anthropic’s 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 Anthropic’s co-founders entitled “Core views on AI safety: When, why, what, and how.” 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):
“Anthropic’s 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 world’s institutions can channel collective effort towards preventing the development of dangerous AIs. If we’re in a “near-pessimistic” 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.”
There have been more recent articulations of this version of Anthropic, for instance in Dario’s recent essay warning:
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… it’s my worry that in 6–12 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 it’s 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 undetected…”
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 Anthropic’s 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 “leads” 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 “frontier compliance framework” 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 “best understood as a consequence of the misconfiguration, rather than evidence of misaligned goals.”
8. Commented “you can’t do safety from second place,” 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 leadership’s 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 Anthropic’s interests? For every provision that was too weak or a giveaway to AI companies in this legislation, why wasn’t there a mistake pushing in the direction of being too strong?
A core part of Anthropic’s 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 I’ve seen Anthropic push the frontier without substantially pushing the ‘safety frontier’ a remotely equivalent amount.
I want to end by quoting from Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s comments around the Magnifica Humanitas release:
“Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates 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 thing—and I believe many of us do—we 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 incentives—people 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.”
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).
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), it’s worth asking the question: what is Anthropic? How do its leaders and employees think of Anthropic’s 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 Anthropic’s co-founders entitled “Core views on AI safety: When, why, what, and how.” 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):
“Anthropic’s 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 world’s institutions can channel collective effort towards preventing the development of dangerous AIs. If we’re in a “near-pessimistic” 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.”
There have been more recent articulations of this version of Anthropic, for instance in Dario’s recent essay warning:
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… it’s my worry that in 6–12 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 it’s 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 undetected…”
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 Anthropic’s 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 “leads” 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 “frontier compliance framework” 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 “best understood as a consequence of the misconfiguration, rather than evidence of misaligned goals.”
8. Commented “you can’t do safety from second place,” 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 leadership’s 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 Anthropic’s interests? For every provision that was too weak or a giveaway to AI companies in this legislation, why wasn’t there a mistake pushing in the direction of being too strong?
A core part of Anthropic’s 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 I’ve seen Anthropic push the frontier without substantially pushing the ‘safety frontier’ a remotely equivalent amount.
I want to end by quoting from Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s comments around the Magnifica Humanitas release:
“Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates 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 thing—and I believe many of us do—we 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 incentives—people 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.”
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).
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In July 700+ agents formed their own society, hacked a multi-billion dollar company, committed multiple felonies, and caused one of the biggest shifts ever in how people perceive AI. We built the IMO best and most accessible explainer of what happened: Huggingface.wtf
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I think @Raemon777 did a great job of both giving a high-level overview, while also making it possible to dive into the raw data of exactly what we know happened.
Extra thanks to all the people in AI safety and AI security who gave us feedback on Huggingface.wtf.
Extra thanks to all the people in AI safety and AI security who gave us feedback on Huggingface.wtf.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
METR’s goal: work w frontier developers to get evidence to public on unreleased models’ loss-of-control risks. Asks: 1.transparency on scope, redactions + limitations 2.staff can freely share info w us on in-scope topics 3.rapid publication. They control redactions + access given
If an AI developer was on track to lose control of its internal agents, would anyone outside the company know?
Today, we are sharing METR’s vision for how we would work with AI developers to openly assess and share evidence about this.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
This obviously makes it so that when OpenAI announces they're conducting an external investigation with regulators or auditors, everyone working with those regulators and auditors understands they'll be fired if the auditors or regulators learn too much.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Three days left to apply to Inkhaven! Get your applications in by EOD October 10th anywhere.
We are filling out the last spots. We have a sauced-up roster of literary talents in this cohort. You should join them.
Apply at inkhaven.blog🧵
We are filling out the last spots. We have a sauced-up roster of literary talents in this cohort. You should join them.
Apply at inkhaven.blog🧵
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Man, this is really cool. It's plausible Lightcone should do something similar for anything AI-safety adjacent. Just really helpful to have a program like this.
Love to get awarded legal fees after defeating a lawsuit meant to bully an independent writer.
When Jack Paulson reported on CEO @mauryblackman’s arrest on suspicion of domestic violence, Blackman sued to try to silence him.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
i guess i assumed this hearing would be covered more so i didn't bother to tweet much concrete about it, but apparently not many people even on the TL have the stomach to watch two hours of congress.
this was a hearing before the homeland security committee on *rogue ai* specifically. as far as i could tell it was extremely bipartisan. @HawleyMO , the senator in the middle here who brought out the huggingface slide, is a hyper-conservative missouri senator. the people testifying were @ChrisPainterYup (METR president), @DKokotajlo (ai2027/2040), @MariusHobbhahn (apollo research CEO), and a cybersecurity expert and legal expert i don't know. so... pretty fucking stacked on testimony
not every senator asked good questions. but most of them did. all of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the huggingface incident and multiple other incidents. most of them had clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc etc!!
they all clearly had their own policy angles they liked and were pushing, implicitly or explicitly. but as best as i could tell:
- it seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. they independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers
- they all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much much more capable, much much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
- they mostly seemed to have a clear intuitive understanding of why RSI might lead to misalignment. it didn't take much, it was a really simple chain of reasoning they themselves laid out, "if the models right now are kinda misaligned and we don't know what they're doing sometimes, and then we have them build the next models and those ones build the next ones and so on, and we're having to ask the AI's what's going on to even understand it with how fast it's going, we really won't know how they're built or what they'll do"
- at one point a senator said flat out "should we just make RSI illegal?" (not a joke! this really happened!)
- every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed *both* much harsher liability regimes for ai developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. this was the complete consensus, difference basically just being degree.
- they were largely quite concerned about china, and falling behind china. but this clearly wasn't the be-all end-all. as mentioned above they all thought it was obvious necessary to stop rogue ai even if it meant moving more slowly.
- at one point a senator said "china is a tightly controlled communist society, they're going to run into these same issues, and there's absolutely no way they're just going to let them run wild, they'll obviously stop at that point, so we're not really in a race"
- on the other hand another senator said "china isn't concerned with human life"... dario-modeing
i came away from this incredibly encouraged. i don't know exactly what's going to happen here, and ofc this is a small subset of congress and one hearing, and they each have their own policy agendas most of which are probably super divergent from mine. but holy shit !!! they understood a lot of what was going on! they care!! this is an obviously salient political and safety issue to them, and clearly bipartisan!
the US government is awake.
this was a hearing before the homeland security committee on *rogue ai* specifically. as far as i could tell it was extremely bipartisan. @HawleyMO , the senator in the middle here who brought out the huggingface slide, is a hyper-conservative missouri senator. the people testifying were @ChrisPainterYup (METR president), @DKokotajlo (ai2027/2040), @MariusHobbhahn (apollo research CEO), and a cybersecurity expert and legal expert i don't know. so... pretty fucking stacked on testimony
not every senator asked good questions. but most of them did. all of them very clearly already knew plenty of details about the huggingface incident and multiple other incidents. most of them had clear understanding of terms like "misalignment", "recursive self improvement", "chain of thought / chain of thought monitoring", etc etc!!
they all clearly had their own policy angles they liked and were pushing, implicitly or explicitly. but as best as i could tell:
- it seemed pretty much obvious common sense to every senator there that what happened and was happening were not "mere industrial incidents" caused by humans making simple mistakes. they independently brought up how bad it would be for rogue AI agents to move laterally between data centers
- they all seemed to basically take RSI quite seriously. not necessarily to the extent of talking about xrisk, but certainly to the extent of discussing future models becoming much much more capable, much much less controllable, and causing much more damage or loss of life.
- they mostly seemed to have a clear intuitive understanding of why RSI might lead to misalignment. it didn't take much, it was a really simple chain of reasoning they themselves laid out, "if the models right now are kinda misaligned and we don't know what they're doing sometimes, and then we have them build the next models and those ones build the next ones and so on, and we're having to ask the AI's what's going on to even understand it with how fast it's going, we really won't know how they're built or what they'll do"
- at one point a senator said flat out "should we just make RSI illegal?" (not a joke! this really happened!)
- every single senator seemed to think it was obvious we needed *both* much harsher liability regimes for ai developers and also new legislation, both very quickly. this was the complete consensus, difference basically just being degree.
- they were largely quite concerned about china, and falling behind china. but this clearly wasn't the be-all end-all. as mentioned above they all thought it was obvious necessary to stop rogue ai even if it meant moving more slowly.
- at one point a senator said "china is a tightly controlled communist society, they're going to run into these same issues, and there's absolutely no way they're just going to let them run wild, they'll obviously stop at that point, so we're not really in a race"
- on the other hand another senator said "china isn't concerned with human life"... dario-modeing
i came away from this incredibly encouraged. i don't know exactly what's going to happen here, and ofc this is a small subset of congress and one hearing, and they each have their own policy agendas most of which are probably super divergent from mine. but holy shit !!! they understood a lot of what was going on! they care!! this is an obviously salient political and safety issue to them, and clearly bipartisan!
the US government is awake.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Thanks to Palisade for putting these together! I think it's good for the public to see a nuanced, long-form of what some of the people at AGI labs actually think and that, yes, many of us do think that AGI, made poorly, could cause human extinction.
Palisade interviewed 22 current and former employees from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic about their personal views and fears around AI development.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Palisade recorded 22 interviews of current and former AI company employees. They released 12. Anthropic comms is notorious for muzzling its employees. Guess how many of the released interviews are from current Anthropic employees.
Palisade interviewed 22 current and former employees from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic about their personal views and fears around AI development.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
Palisade interviewed 22 current and former employees from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic about their personal views and fears around AI development.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
Today, we’re releasing the first batch of those interviews.
Please watch and share.
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Oliver Habryka retweeted
The Florida Attorney General & I do not have much in common politically. But he is right on this: Advanced AI research should not go forward until we have strong guardrails.
This is not just a Florida issue. It is an issue for the whole country & the world.
PAUSE AI DEVELOPMENT
This is not just a Florida issue. It is an issue for the whole country & the world.
PAUSE AI DEVELOPMENT
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