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Anthropic draws fire from White House with AI warnings

Anthropic has often been a rare voice within the artificial intelligence (AI) industry cautioning about the downsides of the technology it develops and supporting regulation — a stance that has recently drawn the ire of the Trump administration and its allies in Silicon Valley.

© Halil Sagirkaya, Anadolu via Getty Images

While the AI company has sought to underscore areas of alignment with the administration, White House officials supporting a more hands-off approach to AI have chafed at the company’s calls for caution.

“If you have a major member of the industry step out and say, ‘Not so much. It’s OK that we get regulated. We need to figure this out at some point,’ then it makes everyone in the industry look selfish,” said Kirsten Martin, dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

“The narrative that this is the best thing for the industry relies upon everyone in the industry being in line,” she added.

This tension became apparent earlier this month when Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark shared a recent speech on “technological optimism and appropriate fear.”

He offered the analogy of a child in a dark room afraid of the mysterious shapes around them that the light reveals to be innocuous objects.

“Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet,” he said. “But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come.”

“And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a........

© The Hill