Anthropics is bringing something new to AI

They pre-judge the “oppressor” and “oppressed” categories. Such a framework ignores basic safeguards, due process, and balance

- PARMY OLSON Bloomberg

FOR YEARS TECHNOLOGY has been defined by the unstoppable growth of a handful of companies. Big Tech’s consolidation of power seemed a foregone conclusion even as Sam Altman’s Open AI sparked an artificial intelligence boom with ChatGPT. Having promised to build AI for humanity, Altman became a proxy for Microsoft Corp., just as his rival in the race to construct utopia, Demis Hassabis, now ships product for Google.

But the last two months of market upheaval—and standoffs with the Pentagon over how this tech might be militarised—have shown a company breaking that mold. Anthropic PBC has no single Big Tech backer it can call a proxy (not yet anyway) and it has shunned the Silicon Valley “blitzscaling” mantra of shipping fast to dominate a market and patch problems on the fly. Its Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has said “no” to many of the things Altman rushed into.