Days after filing confidentially to go public, Anthropic, the $965 billion artificial intelligence juggernaut that’s one of the fastest-growing startups of all time, dropped another bombshell.
In a blog post, Anthropic suggested the world might benefit from a slowdown in development of the very technologies that have been minting cash for the company. Provided global peers agreed, and enforcement mechanisms could be set up, that would help societies deal with the “immense implications” of AI, it said.
Critics have long accused Anthropic of “doom marketing” — hyping its own products as so good that they’re bad. But the post’s co-author, who’s also the company’s co-founder, says the motive is very different. “We say this stuff because we think the world needs to know the truth about what’s happening,” Jack Clark, who now heads Anthropic’s public benefit work, said in an interview.