Why Anthropic really exists—and how it changed

Anthropic is untrustworthy.

This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic's leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI's direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to support it, and violating the fundamental promise the company was founded on. It also shares a few previously unreported details on Anthropic leadership's promises and efforts.[1]

Anthropic has a strong internal culture that has broadly EA views and values, and the company has strong pressures to appear to follow these views and values as it wants to retain talent and the loyalty of staff, but it's very unclear what they would do when it matters most. Their staff should demand answers.

There's a details box here with the title "Suggested questions for Anthropic employees to ask themselves, Dario, the policy team, and the board after reading this post, and for Dario and the board to answer publicly". The box contents are omitted from this narration.

I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on the draft; was willing to share information; and raised awareness of some of the facts discussed here.

[...]

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Outline:

(01:34) 0. What was Anthropics supposed reason for existence?

(05:01) 1. In private, Dario frequently said he won't push the frontier of AI capabilities; later, Anthropic pushed the frontier

(10:54) 2. Anthropic said it will act under the assumption we might be in a pessimistic scenario, but it doesn't seem to do this

(14:40) 3. Anthropic doesnt have strong independent value-aligned governance

(14:47) Anthropic pursued investments from the UAE and Qatar

(17:32) The Long-Term Benefit Trust might be weak

(18:06) More general issues

(19:14) 4. Anthropic had secret non-disparagement agreements

(21:58) 5. Anthropic leaderships lobbying contradicts their image

(24:05) Europe

(24:44) SB-1047

(34:04) Dario argued against any regulation except for transparency requirements

(34:39) Jack Clark publicly lied about the NY RAISE Act

(36:39) Jack Clark tried to push for federal preemption

(37:04) 6. Anthropics leadership quietly walked back the RSP commitments

(37:55) Unannounced removal of the commitment to plan for a pause in scaling

(38:52) Unannounced change in October 2024 on defining ASL-N+1 by the time ASL-N is reached

(40:33) The last-minute change in May 2025 on insider threats

(41:11) 7. Why does Anthropic really exist?

(47:09) 8. Conclusion

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 29th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aKRshJzhojqfbRyo/unless-its-governance-changes-anthropic-is-untrustworthy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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