Anthropic simultaneously warns about AI's catastrophic risks and pushes capabilities forward, ranking among the top developers of cutting-edge models, courting customers like the US military, and recently being valued at almost $1 trillion. Internally, the company sees no contradiction: it operates on two core beliefs—that AI is the most transformative technology in human history and its arrival is inevitable, and that the world is better off if Anthropic remains at the frontier of the AI race, according to several former employees who spoke to WIRED anonymously.
Employees and leaders inside the company often call themselves the "good guys," meaning responsible stewards of AI technology. The company views accumulating power in capital, compute, research talent, and political influence as the price of fulfilling its mission to "ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI."
Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, described Anthropic's worldview using a forest analogy: powerful AI is a forest full of magical treasures and dangerous monsters, and Anthropic wants to venture farther in than anyone else while investing heavily in taming the monsters. "What's distinctive about Anthropic is they're like, 'People are going in the forest anyway, we have to do it first,'" Toner said. CEO Dario Amodei echoed the approach on the company's career page: "You have to find a way to actually be competitive, to actually lead the industry in some cases, and yet manage to do things safely."