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The dark horse of AI labs
How Anthropic’s missionary zeal is fuelling its commercial success.
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Anthropic, which puts its safety mission above making money, has an in-house philosopher and a chatbot with the Gallic-sounding name of Claude.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
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Perhaps it is inevitable that Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) lab founded by do-gooders, attracts snark in Silicon Valley. The company, which puts its safety mission above making money, has an in-house philosopher and a chatbot with the Gallic-sounding name of Claude. Even so, the profile of some of those who have recently attacked Anthropic is striking.
One is Mr Jensen Huang, boss of Nvidia, the most valuable company on earth. After Dr Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, raised the spectre of big job losses as a result of advances in AI, Mr Huang bluntly retorted: “I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says.” Another is Mr David Sacks, a venture capitalist (VC) who is one of US President Donald Trump’s closest tech advisers. In a recent podcast, he and his co-hosts accused Anthropic of being part of a “doomer industrial complex”.
