Anthropic has destroyed it The past five years have been warning the world about how advanced artificial intelligence can enable mass destruction, destabilize society, and cause a host of other dire dangers. But at the same time, it has become one of the most powerful forces pushing AI capabilities forward. The company is now among the top developers and distributors of advanced AI models with customers in courts such as the US military. It was recently estimated at $1 trillion.
At first glance, Anthropic’s strong messages and actions appear to be at odds.
But inside the company, most people don’t see the contradiction. To understand why, you must first understand that Anthropic operates based on two key beliefs. The first is that artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology in human history, and its arrival is inevitable. The only real question is whether it leads to disaster or extraordinary prosperity.
The second is that Anthropic believes the world will be better off if it stays on the frontier of the AI race, according to several former employees who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity. Internally, leaders and employees at the company often refer to themselves as “the good guys,” meaning those in charge of AI technology, two of the sources said. The company sees accumulating power—whether it’s money, computing, research talent, or political influence—not as an end in itself, but as the price of accomplishing its mission: “to ensure that the world makes changes safely through revolutionary AI.”
Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies and a former OpenAI board member, uses an analogy to describe the Anthropic vision of the world. He contrasts a powerful AI with a forest full of magical treasures and dangerous monsters. All the nearby villagers rushed in, attracted by the treasure. In his narrative, Anthropic wants to penetrate the jungle more than anyone else while investing heavily in monster control—that is, capturing the benefits of AI while containing its catastrophic risks.
“The difference with Anthropic is like, ‘People are going to the forest anyway, we have to do it first.’ This is their clear strategy: to build advanced AI so that you can be a serious player at the table who can talk about what advanced AI systems look like, what risks they pose, and what they want to protect against,” Toner tells me. “They’re very direct about this. It’s just a weird trick that people have a hard time hearing.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clearly stated this approach in an interview with his founders written on the company’s job page: “You have to find a way to be competitive, to lead the industry in some situations, but be able to do things safely,” he said. If you can do that, the gravity you have is very good.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees who defected after losing faith in the ability of the company’s leadership—especially CEO Sam Altman—to safely bring AI revolution to the world. That feeling still shapes the company today. Two of the former employees I spoke with said that, in internal discussions, Anthropic executives often point to Altman and OpenAI—and, to a lesser extent, Meta’s xAI and Elon Musk—as cautionary examples that help explain Anthropic’s sense of responsibility.
In many ways, Anthropic is like any other Silicon Valley company. Many startups are marketing themselves as Davids fighting against the outdated, entrenched Goliaths in the industries they seek to disrupt. Google, Facebook, and Apple were all founded on sound principles, which were later muddied or abandoned altogether as they grew richer, bigger, and more influential.
