Will Anthropic slow down?

OpenAI has paused its largest frontier reinforcement-learning run while studying 'various degrees of misalignment,' according to CEO Sam Altman, with expanded monitoring adding roughly 20% to the inference compute being monitored. The pause raises questions about whether Anthropic, whose alignment work may be ahead of OpenAI's, will face similar slowdowns as its frontier models advance.

There are several ways to interpret the implications of OpenAI’s moves this week for Anthropic. OpenAI’s largest frontier reinforcement-learning run remains on hold while the company studies what Sam Altman described to me https://sources.news/p/openais-big-slowdown as “various degrees of misalignment.” OpenAI says its expanded monitoring adds roughly 20% to the inference compute being monitored. That isn’t 20% of all internal inference, but it is a substantial compute tax. If the company made this move as a public stock, it’s hard not to imagine a strong market reaction. Anthropic’s alignment work, meanwhile, could simply be ahead of OpenAI’s. Its internal frontier models could be less capable, meaning they aren’t showing the same problems yet. Or Anthropic could be seeing warning signs it hasn’t discussed, with a model jump forcing the issue soon.