Take another example. Last year, Chris Olah, another Anthropic cofounder, was invited to address the Vatican, where he told Pope Leo XIV and other religious scholars and officials what his company was learning about its technology. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.”
Never mind that many researchers would scoff at such an overt suggestion that Anthropic’s software has humanlike inner experience. This view of its technology makes its way into the prospectus as one more risk to its business. Anthropic states that: “In addition, given our focus on developing frontier AI, and the way we approach model sentience and moral status, we may face heightened scrutiny or pressure in connection with these debates and could elect to adopt policies, safeguards, or limitations regarding model development, deployment, or modification that go beyond existing legal requirements, which could constrain our operations, increase costs, or limit the commercial potential of our models, platform, and applications.”
In other words, if Claude wakes up, it could be a problem.
I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong about any of this (although it’s pretty wild to read about machine sentience in an IPO prospectus.) But in a world where nobody knows what’s coming, companies like Anthropic get to fill the vacuum. When so little seems certain, what it says is snatched up and clung to like pieces of a sinking ship.
It’s worth taking a moment to ask: What is Anthropic? It might sound like a starter question on a family quiz show, but it’s far harder to answer than you might think.
The question has been on my mind since reading an exchange on X last week kicked off by Nathan Calvin, who is chief strategy officer at Encode AI, an organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for regulation. Calvin was unhappy about the legislation that Anthropic proposed in a draft bill it circulated in secret to US lawmakers (which was then leaked).
Anthropic wants to be seen as the good guy, Calvin said. But why should we trust it? “What is Anthropic?” he asked.
Here’s one answer: Anthropic is a company whose IPO values it at more than $1.5 trillion, netting its cofounders, including Clark and Olah, vast wealth.
