Daniela Amodei describes how Anthropic, structured as a public-benefit corporation, works with policymakers and nonprofits to shape AI governance rather than deciding alone. The company has a dedicated policy team led by a non-technical co-founder, and partners with civil-society groups to inform both corporate decisions and public policy.
Chapters
More broadly then with the ethic that you have at Anthropic, how do you see your role in the broader societal efforts around governing AI in a responsible way? I was thinking about how we have one chance to get it right and we can't let people down. So how do you see your role, Anthropic's role, in helping to guide what AI could do for humanity? There's so much opportunity, yet there is risk.
Absolutely. So I think what's interesting about this is Anthropic is a company, right? We're a public benefit corporation and we have this very lofty social mission. And I don't think anybody, including us, thinks it's right for us or any particular company alone to be the arbiter of what happens with this technology. There's a few different ways that we try and collaborate or work with other groups to say where does this decision live? Who is the group or the set of people driving these outcomes? One way that we do that is we've had a policy team basically since day one. The only other non technical co founder of ours is our policy director. He has just done an incredible job working with policymakers and government officials to really think about what are the ways that we want this technology to be regulated or what are the rules and guardrails beyond the corporate level, where we might want this technology to be looked at, what are the insights about it that we need to share to the government and policymakers around the world to help them understand what's happening? We also work with a number of civil society and nonprofit groups that work on many of the issues that you've talked about. And that's because those groups often have additional expertise that we don't necessarily have within our walls. Right. There are groups that think specifically about particular elements of how this technology will be used or abused, where we can lean on their expertise.
