In 2021, a circle of researchers left OpenAI, after a bitter dispute with their executives. They started a competing company, Anthropic, stating that they wanted to put safety first. The safety community responded with broad support. Thought leaders recommended engineers to apply, and allied billionaires invested.[1]

Anthropic's focus has shifted – from internal-only research and cautious demos of model safety and capabilities, toward commercialising models for Amazon and the military.

Despite the shift, 80,000 Hours continues to recommend talented engineers to join Anthropic. On the LessWrong forum, many authors continue to support safety work at Anthropic, but I also see side-conversations where people raise concerns about premature model releases and policy overreaches. So, a bunch of seemingly conflicting opinions about work by different Anthropic staff, and no overview. But the bigger problem is that we are not evaluating Anthropic on its original justification for existence.

Did early researchers put [...]

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Outline:

(04:47) 1. Scaled GPT before founding Anthropic

(19:02) Rationale #1: 'AI progress is inevitable'

(24:09) Rationale #2: 'we scale first so we can make it safe'

(30:01) Rationale #3: 'we reduce the hardware overhang now to prevent disruption later'

(32:39) 2. Founded an AGI development company and started competing on capabilities

(39:12) Early commitments

(41:09) Degrading commitments

(44:52) Declining safety governance

(46:27) 3. Lobbied for policies that minimised Anthropic's accountability for safety

(47:14) Minimal 'Responsible Scaling Policies'

(59:20) Lobbied against provisions in SB 1047

(01:02:25) 4. Built ties with AI weapons contractors and the US military

(01:03:50) Anthropics intel-defence partnership

(01:06:20) Anthropics earlier ties

(01:07:40) 5. Promoted band-aid fixes to speculative risks over existing dangers that are costly to address

(01:11:50) Cheap fixes for risks that are still speculative

(01:14:02) Example of an existing problem that is costly to address

(01:17:20) Conclusion

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 1st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBd7xPAh22y66rbme/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

This comic compares professional attitudes toward safety across three fields: aircraft, elevators, and computerized voting systems. The stick figure engineers provide increasingly concerning responses about their respective technologies, with software engineers being particularly alarmed about electronic voting and blockchain solutions.

The humor lies in contrasting the confident safety assurances about aircraft and elevators with the software engineers' brutal honesty about the dangers of computerized voting systems.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Anthropic’s leading researchers acted as moderate accelerationists” by Remmelt

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Anthropic’s leading researchers acted as moderate accelerationists” by Remmelt