Something potentially far more consequential than a $1.8 million campaign-finance violation is unfolding in Michigan today.
Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel has signed a complaint alleging that @MIGOP provided @JohnJamesMI with $1.8 million in coordinated er $150,000 in direct contributions, exceeding Michigan's statutory party-contribution limits.
At first glance, that looks like a remarkably conspicuous violation for a sophisticated statewide campaign. But I suspect James and the Michigan GOP may be pursuing something much more interesting: extending the Supreme Court's June decision in NRSC v. FEC to state election law.
And I think they would likely prevail on the constitutional argument.
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Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel has signed a complaint alleging that @MIGOP provided @JohnJamesMI with $1.8 million in coordinated er $150,000 in direct contributions, exceeding Michigan's statutory party-contribution limits.
At first glance, that looks like a remarkably conspicuous violation for a sophisticated statewide campaign. But I suspect James and the Michigan GOP may be pursuing something much more interesting: extending the Supreme Court's June decision in NRSC v. FEC to state election law.
And I think they would likely prevail on the constitutional argument.
🧵 1/4
This John James campaign finance report is pretty interesting.
It shows $1.9 million in in-kind contributions from the Michigan GOP.
I am currently exploring how this is possible given current state contribution limits.
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Here's the particularly interesting part of today's complaint. @CurtisHertelJr points to the advertisement's disclaimers:
"Paid for with regulated funds by Michigan Republican Party,"
"Authorized by John James for MI," and
"Approved by John James";
calling them a "virtual admission of coordination."
But after NRSC, coordination is likely what will bring the expenditure squarely within the Supreme Court's holding. Michigan GOP seems to have financed the advertising in coordination with James, and his campaign openly reported it as an in-kind contribution.
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"Paid for with regulated funds by Michigan Republican Party,"
"Authorized by John James for MI," and
"Approved by John James";
calling them a "virtual admission of coordination."
But after NRSC, coordination is likely what will bring the expenditure squarely within the Supreme Court's holding. Michigan GOP seems to have financed the advertising in coordination with James, and his campaign openly reported it as an in-kind contribution.
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Now consider the potential strategy and timing.
If Michigan declines enforcement, the advertisements accomplish their immediate purpose without requiring a constitutional ruling.
If Michigan proceeds, it will very likely tee up the next landmark Supreme Court campaign-finance case: whether states can continue restricting coordinated party expenditures that NRSC v. FEC held are protected by the First Amendment.
By filing today's complaint, @CurtisHertelJr and @MichiganDems may inadvertently be giving James and @MIGOP exactly the case in controversy that could reach SCOTUS.
What looks like a late-cycle campaign-finance mistake on its face might become a consequential next chapter in the First Amendment election law jurisprudence.
4/4
If Michigan declines enforcement, the advertisements accomplish their immediate purpose without requiring a constitutional ruling.
If Michigan proceeds, it will very likely tee up the next landmark Supreme Court campaign-finance case: whether states can continue restricting coordinated party expenditures that NRSC v. FEC held are protected by the First Amendment.
By filing today's complaint, @CurtisHertelJr and @MichiganDems may inadvertently be giving James and @MIGOP exactly the case in controversy that could reach SCOTUS.
What looks like a late-cycle campaign-finance mistake on its face might become a consequential next chapter in the First Amendment election law jurisprudence.
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I genuinely want @spacexai to disrupt the frontier AI market, but Grok 4.7 at xhigh effort in @cursor_ai has been extraordinarily disappointing. Two days of execution and an entire month’s credits of the legacy Cursor Ultra plan produced just 2 of 29 tasks coded properly, despite iculously detailed implementation plan with 29 tasks mapped to specific source files and dependencies, detailed architecture, schemas, a file-by-file change map, and 104 defined acceptance scenarios, along with additional verification requirements.
The design, implementation sequence, and requirements for proving completion were already established. Nevertheless, Grok repeatedly stopped working dozens of times, even in Goal Mode. I added a separate /loop on top of Goal Mode, which it ignored and actually acknowledged ignoring several times when I asked. At one point, I resorted to running Gemini 4 separately in Antigravity just to nudge Grok every few minutes because it kept stopping and doing nothing.
After the Cursor credits ran out, I asked Opus 5.5 to audit the implementation and finish the remaining work. In less than five minutes, it found that only 2 of 29 tasks were genuinely wired into the system. What bothers me most is that this wasn’t simply a model struggling to solve a difficult problem. Much of that work had already been done for it. Yet Grok repeatedly failed to execute the instructions and produced substantial amounts of code that gave the appearance of progress without delivering the required functionality.
@elonmusk had already identified these same problems as reasons for delaying Grok 4.7’s initial rollout. Yet it seems those problems remain largely unresolved. @poteto @mntruell @amanrsanger @sualehasif996 I really hope you all are working on improving these issues, which other frontier models have long overcome. I truly want Grok to succeed and blow the completion out of the water!
The design, implementation sequence, and requirements for proving completion were already established. Nevertheless, Grok repeatedly stopped working dozens of times, even in Goal Mode. I added a separate /loop on top of Goal Mode, which it ignored and actually acknowledged ignoring several times when I asked. At one point, I resorted to running Gemini 4 separately in Antigravity just to nudge Grok every few minutes because it kept stopping and doing nothing.
After the Cursor credits ran out, I asked Opus 5.5 to audit the implementation and finish the remaining work. In less than five minutes, it found that only 2 of 29 tasks were genuinely wired into the system. What bothers me most is that this wasn’t simply a model struggling to solve a difficult problem. Much of that work had already been done for it. Yet Grok repeatedly failed to execute the instructions and produced substantial amounts of code that gave the appearance of progress without delivering the required functionality.
@elonmusk had already identified these same problems as reasons for delaying Grok 4.7’s initial rollout. Yet it seems those problems remain largely unresolved. @poteto @mntruell @amanrsanger @sualehasif996 I really hope you all are working on improving these issues, which other frontier models have long overcome. I truly want Grok to succeed and blow the completion out of the water!
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I think the timing and substance of Anthropic’s proposed AI legislation deserve considerably more scrutiny, particularly given the extraordinary financial incentives surrounding its anticipated IPO.
Anthropic is reportedly preparing to go public in November at a valuation estimated at ~$1.5 trillion, It has committed to spending at least $518 billion on computing and infrastructure over the coming decade. At that valuation, even a 1% change in perceived regulatory risk could theoretically translate into $15 billion in equity value.
Those are enormous stakes for a company whose future depends on continually releasing increasingly powerful AI models, despite publicly acknowledging that those same models could pose catastrophic risks.
To be clear, the proposal includes meaningful safety obligations. But it would substantially influence who sets the standards, who exercises oversight, and how difficult it becomes for the government to intervene.
There is an especially striking inconsistency here. In June, Dario invoked the FAA’s regulatory model as an example of how government should approach advanced AI. Yet the FAA does not simply allow aircraft manufacturers to establish their own governing airworthiness standards and then require the government to demonstrate that a specified number of people face imminent death before meaningful intervention becomes available.
And the incentives go well beyond regulatory compliance.
A favorable federal framework could also strengthen Anthropic’s competitive position by establishing compliance requirements that an incumbent with substantial resources and established safety infrastructure may be better positioned to satisfy than emerging competitors.
Obtaining those protections before an IPO would translate directly into a higher offering valuation, more favorable financing, and greater liquidity for existing shareholders. Conversely, entering the public markets without them leaves investors exposed to potentially significant regulatory intervention, inconsistent legal requirements, and litigation over increasingly consequential AI deployments.
None of this establishes that Anthropic’s stated safety concerns are insincere. Nor does it establish that the company initiated its legislative advocacy solely to benefit its IPO. Anthropic has advocated federal AI regulation for some time, and there are legitimate arguments for national standards and predictable procedures governing agency intervention.
But sincerity and financial self-interest are hardly mutually exclusive.
I would be interested in hearing Dario address the financial implications directly. What would the proposed framework mean for Anthropic’s IPO valuation, existing shareholders, and anticipated capital requirements? Why should Congress prefer developer-defined safety standards over independently prescribed minimum requirements, particularly given Anthropic’s own assessment of the risks? And why should the government accept such narrowly defined intervention authority when the nature and magnitude of future AI risks remain uncertain?
When a company approaching a potentially $1.5 trillion IPO is effectively helping write the rules governing its own regulatory exposure, we must naturally ask whether the proposed legislation is principally designed to protect the public or protect the company’s commercial interests.
Anthropic is reportedly preparing to go public in November at a valuation estimated at ~$1.5 trillion, It has committed to spending at least $518 billion on computing and infrastructure over the coming decade. At that valuation, even a 1% change in perceived regulatory risk could theoretically translate into $15 billion in equity value.
Those are enormous stakes for a company whose future depends on continually releasing increasingly powerful AI models, despite publicly acknowledging that those same models could pose catastrophic risks.
To be clear, the proposal includes meaningful safety obligations. But it would substantially influence who sets the standards, who exercises oversight, and how difficult it becomes for the government to intervene.
There is an especially striking inconsistency here. In June, Dario invoked the FAA’s regulatory model as an example of how government should approach advanced AI. Yet the FAA does not simply allow aircraft manufacturers to establish their own governing airworthiness standards and then require the government to demonstrate that a specified number of people face imminent death before meaningful intervention becomes available.
And the incentives go well beyond regulatory compliance.
A favorable federal framework could also strengthen Anthropic’s competitive position by establishing compliance requirements that an incumbent with substantial resources and established safety infrastructure may be better positioned to satisfy than emerging competitors.
Obtaining those protections before an IPO would translate directly into a higher offering valuation, more favorable financing, and greater liquidity for existing shareholders. Conversely, entering the public markets without them leaves investors exposed to potentially significant regulatory intervention, inconsistent legal requirements, and litigation over increasingly consequential AI deployments.
None of this establishes that Anthropic’s stated safety concerns are insincere. Nor does it establish that the company initiated its legislative advocacy solely to benefit its IPO. Anthropic has advocated federal AI regulation for some time, and there are legitimate arguments for national standards and predictable procedures governing agency intervention.
But sincerity and financial self-interest are hardly mutually exclusive.
I would be interested in hearing Dario address the financial implications directly. What would the proposed framework mean for Anthropic’s IPO valuation, existing shareholders, and anticipated capital requirements? Why should Congress prefer developer-defined safety standards over independently prescribed minimum requirements, particularly given Anthropic’s own assessment of the risks? And why should the government accept such narrowly defined intervention authority when the nature and magnitude of future AI risks remain uncertain?
When a company approaching a potentially $1.5 trillion IPO is effectively helping write the rules governing its own regulatory exposure, we must naturally ask whether the proposed legislation is principally designed to protect the public or protect the company’s commercial interests.
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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Tibo @thsottiaux what is cooking today? What are we going to do to show up Anthropic and their S-1. We believe in you.
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Poplicola retweeted
Introducing Muse Wonder, our new family of frontier models with state of the art performance for personal and professional agentic work.
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Looks like we might be getting muse watermelon this week 🍉 🍉 🍉
just in time to show up Gemini 4 Argon
@alexandr_wang @finkd
just in time to show up Gemini 4 Argon
@alexandr_wang @finkd
🚨 Zuck is live on Insta smoking meats again 🚨
This is not a drill.
“Yeah Tank, we’re smoking sausage. Smoke whatever the fuck we want.”
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Poplicola retweeted
Monthly API credits are now available on Max and Team plans: $100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x, and up to $500 pooled on Team. Use them on any Claude model.
How it works and full terms: support.claude.com/en/articles/17…
How it works and full terms: support.claude.com/en/articles/17…
We’re rolling out monthly Claude Platform API credits for Max and Team plans:
Max 5x: $100
Max 20x: $200
Team: up to $500, pooled
Works on any model, including Haiku 5.5, in your code or third-party harnesses.
How it works and full terms: support.claude.com/en/articles/17…
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New foreign policy just dropped at the Rose Garden Club.
@marcorubio @SusieWiles47 #AlorsOnDanse #WhiteHouse
@marcorubio @SusieWiles47 #AlorsOnDanse #WhiteHouse
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Poplicola retweeted
Anthropic valuation - $2 Trillion
OpenAI valuation - $1.5 Trillion
Meta valuation - $1.85 Trillion
Anthropic 2025 revenue - $4.6 Billion
OpenAI 2025 revenue - $13 Billion
Meta 2025 revenue - $200 Billion+
OpenAI valuation - $1.5 Trillion
Meta valuation - $1.85 Trillion
Anthropic 2025 revenue - $4.6 Billion
OpenAI 2025 revenue - $13 Billion
Meta 2025 revenue - $200 Billion+
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yo @alexandr_wang can you fix this nonsense with @Muse not working in background on IOS?? (yes all my settings are allow, use app in background, cellular data, etc).
How is it still a thing I need to open the app for any automations to work. (it thinks phone offline)
How is it still a thing I need to open the app for any automations to work. (it thinks phone offline)
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