Decoder with Nilay Patel The tiny team trying to keep AI from destroying everything
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Dec 4, 2025 
Hayden Field, a Senior AI reporter at The Verge, dives into the crucial role of Anthropic's tiny societal impacts team. With just nine members, their mission is to uncover and report unsettling truths about AI, from harmful biases to the complexities of safety versus business pressures. Hayden shares fascinating insights on the balance between genuine safety efforts and PR, the influence of political pressures on AI standards, and how Anthropic's focus on enterprise might shield them from consumer backlash.
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Small Team, Vast Mandate
- Anthropic's Societal Impacts Team is nine people tasked with studying broad societal effects of AI globally.
- They focus on jobs, elections, mental health, misuse, and model values rather than product tweaks.
Data-Driven Social Research
- The team analyzes real usage data to surface how people use Claude and where harms emerge.
- They investigate trust, misinformation, persuasion, global perspectives, and coordinated misuse.
Publishing Damning Internal Findings
- The team publishes 'inconvenient truths' and has released findings that reflect poorly on Anthropic itself.
- Anthropic currently allows this damning research to be public, though that autonomy may not last.