Anthropic is explicitly (legally) a mission-driven company and not investor-captured. The final say goes to a small group of independent trustees. They aren’t legally required to make a profit if it goes against their mission. I learned about this from listening to a podcast episode with Eric Ries (the guy who wrote The Lean Startup) talking about how a supreme court case turned companies from explicitly mission-driven to profit-driven and how newer companies are trying to explicitly combat this in their charters.
I don’t think this is a sufficient explanation. You can always find loopholes in such legal structures if you really want to, and it’s something I’m pretty sure the DoW was explicitly willing to help with. So why didn’t they all collude to do just that?
People associated with Anthropic are rich and powerful due to Anthropic’s existence, and expect to become exponentially more rich and powerful as Anthropic continues to exist and grow. The DoW is powerful and dangerous; making an enemy of it endangered Anthropic’s continued existence. If some fairly flimsy legal structure (plus the need to spin it in a positive light to the public and employees) was all that stood in the way of Anthropic cooperating with the DoW, I don’t think it would have held.
The DoW is powerful and dangerous; making an enemy of it endangered Anthropic’s continued existence.
I think this is what turned out to be wrong. It’s still bad for Anthropic, and they have suffered consequences, but they haven’t really suffered existential consequences.
To be clear, it was in expectation an existentially risky move, because Anthropic didn’t know whether or not Amazon and Google would cut off their supply of compute due to the legal uncertainties of the supply chain risk designation, and if that happened Anthropic would have to close up shop soon.
But this turned out not to happen, and Amazon and Google supported Anthropic and still sold them the compute, and Trump’s legal position was weak enough that they couldn’t do anything (and yes, the law still matters even under Trump)
Fable was a more close call, because Anthropic was losing billions of revenue from having it be taken off the market for 2 and a half weeks, and because the classifiers had to be tuned in the direction of even more refusals, but Anthropic soon managed to switch the communicator from Dario to Tom Brown, who was better at politics, and managed to get Fable back on July 1st, before OpenAI managed to deploy GPT 5.6.
As it turns out, the U.S presidency’s leverage was weaker than it appeared both times, and this prevented Anthropic from collapsing/falling victim to Molochian/Pythian dynamics.
Anthropic is explicitly (legally) a mission-driven company and not investor-captured. The final say goes to a small group of independent trustees. They aren’t legally required to make a profit if it goes against their mission. I learned about this from listening to a podcast episode with Eric Ries (the guy who wrote The Lean Startup) talking about how a supreme court case turned companies from explicitly mission-driven to profit-driven and how newer companies are trying to explicitly combat this in their charters.
I don’t think this is a sufficient explanation. You can always find loopholes in such legal structures if you really want to, and it’s something I’m pretty sure the DoW was explicitly willing to help with. So why didn’t they all collude to do just that?
People associated with Anthropic are rich and powerful due to Anthropic’s existence, and expect to become exponentially more rich and powerful as Anthropic continues to exist and grow. The DoW is powerful and dangerous; making an enemy of it endangered Anthropic’s continued existence. If some fairly flimsy legal structure (plus the need to spin it in a positive light to the public and employees) was all that stood in the way of Anthropic cooperating with the DoW, I don’t think it would have held.
I think this is what turned out to be wrong. It’s still bad for Anthropic, and they have suffered consequences, but they haven’t really suffered existential consequences.
To be clear, it was in expectation an existentially risky move, because Anthropic didn’t know whether or not Amazon and Google would cut off their supply of compute due to the legal uncertainties of the supply chain risk designation, and if that happened Anthropic would have to close up shop soon.
But this turned out not to happen, and Amazon and Google supported Anthropic and still sold them the compute, and Trump’s legal position was weak enough that they couldn’t do anything (and yes, the law still matters even under Trump)
Fable was a more close call, because Anthropic was losing billions of revenue from having it be taken off the market for 2 and a half weeks, and because the classifiers had to be tuned in the direction of even more refusals, but Anthropic soon managed to switch the communicator from Dario to Tom Brown, who was better at politics, and managed to get Fable back on July 1st, before OpenAI managed to deploy GPT 5.6.
As it turns out, the U.S presidency’s leverage was weaker than it appeared both times, and this prevented Anthropic from collapsing/falling victim to Molochian/Pythian dynamics.