When Keeping Your Principles Becomes a Luxury

Anthropic was supposed to be different.

Not different in the way every tech company claims to be different. Different in a specific, documented, uncomfortable way. Its Responsible Scaling Policy committed the company to a simple idea. Before training a more capable model, specific safety conditions had to be met. Not aspirations. Not intentions. Conditions with teeth.

That commitment attracted a particular kind of person. Researchers who had left other labs because they wanted to work somewhere that took the risk seriously. Investors who believed safety and commercial success could coexist. A public that was beginning to ask hard questions about who was actually in charge of the most powerful technology ever built.

Anthropic’s answer was: we are. And we put it in writing.

This week Time Magazine reported that the writing changed.