Reed’s view
Anthropic has, once again, found its future in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. None of this is necessary.
The thing most people don’t realize is that Anthropic isn’t fundamentally opposed to the current administration’s economic goals. It isn’t the “woke” or anti-capitalist caricature that the administration has publicly attacked. It’s a startup on the precipice of a $1 trillion IPO that wants to make money and share (at least part of) the spoils of the AI economic boom.
What the company has miscalculated is how it’s communicated with the Trump administration — and the general public — about its business.
Take CEO Dario Amodei’s comments that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white collar jobs and spike unemployment — grand proclamations that some in the administration took as stoking fear over the technology, rather than framing its business as a force of economic growth in a country that has the chance to lead the world on AI development. Or the public dust-up with the Pentagon, that eventually erupted, about the theoretical use of its models in mass surveillance of US citizens, something the military doesn’t actually have the legal authority to do.
Over-torqued discourse also seems to be at the center of last week’s spat with the US government over Mythos and Fable 5, which led to export controls on some of the company’s most sophisticated models. By touting its rigorous safety and testing protocols to a fault when it released Fable, the company projected a sense of locked-down security that then surprised the US government when the model was inevitably jailbroken.
In all of these instances, a compromise for uniformity was there for the taking. But Anthropic’s decisions to fight these battles set the company up for conflict.
A year from now, Anthropic may have the last laugh. It will likely be a successful public company with soaring revenue, while the Trump administration finishes out a potentially lame-duck term. But the AI lab won’t have taken the easiest path to get there.
Smart companies typically try to make the differences between them and the government seem small and insignificant. Anthropic has only made those differences seem bigger.
Notable
- CEOs including Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis took part in a lunch meeting at the G7 summit on Wednesday alongside world leaders.
- Trump said at the G7 summit talks with Anthropic about restoring the AI firm’s latest models were “going fine,” The Wall Street Journal reported.