Who decides the rules for AI?
Can AI give my children a better future?
Does AI make the world a more dangerous place?
Can AI help scientists cure diseases?
People have a lot of hard questions about AI. It’s our job to address them.
Many people are positively disposed to AI. They already use it every day, and they see its potential for making our work and our lives less laborious, for changing the way we learn, for helping speed up scientific and technological progress, for creating new sources of prosperity, and for solving some of the biggest medical and social problems we face.
But many also hold serious concerns. Some are worried about AI’s potential contribution to job loss. Some fear that it could devalue creative work. Others are concerned about human agency: that AI might affect our ability to think for ourselves, to make human connections, and to have meaning in our lives. Many are concerned about what it means if AI’s capabilities fall into the wrong hands—and wonder whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
In the film below, you can hear some of these hopes and concerns from people we’ve spoken with.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation—it’s our mission to secure the benefits of advanced AI models and mitigate their risks. That public benefit mission has led us, for example, to invest in AI safeguards to reduce the risk of misuse, to research the behavior and inner workings of AI models to help us align them to beneficial goals, to give our AI models for free to scientists, and to launch a fellowship program that pairs early-career Claude users with nonprofits to help extend the benefits of AI.
To truly act in the public interest, we need to fully understand the hopes and concerns the public has about this new technology. As part of our new initiative on hard questions, we’re taking further steps to understand people’s views and questions on a variety of AI-related topics, and transparently chart our progress toward our public benefit goals.
We’ve already been laying the groundwork, asking thousands of people for their views on AI:
- We’ve begun the Anthropic Public Record—a public survey that, in its first round, asked 52,000 Americans to set out their biggest hopes and concerns about this technology; - We surveyed 81,000 Claude usersacross 159 countries and 70 languages through ourAnthropic Interviewer; - We conducted dozens of in-person focus groups and
[convened sessions](https://www.anthropic.com/news/widening-conversation-ai)with groups whose work and traditions bear on the questions raised by AI; and - We’ve been
[studying](https://www.anthropic.com/economic-index)the use of Claude through anonymized, real-world data.
We created the Anthropic Institute—a research effort within the company with the goal of confronting the most significant challenges that AI will pose to society—and since early in our company’s history our Long-Term Benefit Trust has provided impartial oversight on how effectively we’re advancing our public benefit mission.
Now, we’re explicitly asking you to send us your hardest questions on AI: questions about AI’s effects on jobs, society, and families; questions about how we achieve the dramatic potential of AI for science and medicine; questions about where one of the most powerful technologies in human history can take us next.
In return, we’ll publicly track and report the specific actions we’re taking to address those questions—and we’ll be clear about the ways in which we might fall short of our stated goals.
To see some of the questions others are asking, and to share your own, visit our hard questions website.
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