TL;DRAnthropic spent six months warning about AI risk, weakening its own safety pledge, withholding its most powerful model, filing for an IPO, calling for an industry slowdown, and then watching the White House shut down its flagship models. This timeline traces the paradox.
No company in the AI industry has done more to warn the public about the technology it is building than Anthropic. No company has had those warnings turned against it quite so brutally.
In the past six months, Anthropic has published a 19,000-word essay on civilisational risk, weakened its own safety pledge, been designated a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, withheld its most powerful model from the public, called for a coordinated industry slowdown, released that model anyway, filed for an IPO, and watched the White House shut it all down. Here is how it happened.
January: the warning
On 27 January, CEO Dario Amodei published “The Adolescence of Technology,” a sprawling essay warning that AI poses a “serious civilisational challenge.” He argued that AI systems capable of recursive self-improvement could arrive within years, and that the window for establishing oversight was closing.
