It was the summer of 2021, and Dario Amodei was wrestling with a problem. After years advancing the frontiers of artificial intelligence, first as a research scientist at OpenAI and then as their research director, Dario had come to a troubling realization: While AI capabilities were progressing at breakneck speed, efforts to ensure these increasingly powerful systems would be safe and beneficial were lagging far behind.
Dario wasn‘t alone in his concern. Across the AI research community, a small but growing contingent were sounding the alarm about the potential risks posed by advanced AI systems. What if an AI system, in single-minded pursuit of a goal, caused unintended harm? What if a highly capable AI was used for malicious purposes? Most concerning of all, what if the rapid advancement of AI capabilities outpaced our understanding of how to control them?
It was with these heavy questions weighing on his mind that Dario made a decision: It was time to build an AI research company laser-focused on these challenges. An organization dedicated not just to pushing the boundaries of what AI could do, but ensuring it would be robustly beneficial as it grew more powerful. With that conviction, Anthropic was born.
Assembling the Team
Anthropic‘s key founders: Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei (COO), and Chris Olah (Chief Scientist)
To tackle a challenge as immense as AI safety, Dario knew he would need an extraordinary team. He began by reaching out to colleagues who shared his mission and whose talents he deeply respected.
One of his first calls was to Chris Olah, a polymath who had made groundbreaking contributions to AI interpretability and safety. At OpenAI and Google Brain, Chris had led efforts to open up the "black box" of neural networks, developing techniques to visualize and understand how these systems made decisions. His work gave the AI safety community its first real glimpse into the minds of machines.
Chris immediately resonated with Dario‘s vision and agreed to join Anthropic as Chief Scientist. His mandate: chart a research agenda to illuminate the most pressing problems in AI safety and pursue solutions with rigor and creativity.
Next, Dario turned to Daniela Amodei, a leader with a rare combination of technical depth and operational savvy. Daniela had honed her skills at Stanford GSB and Bain & Company before diving into the world of AI, quickly earning a reputation as a force to be reckoned with. As Anthropic‘s COO, she would deftly steer the growing organization and ensure the research had the backing and space to make an outsized impact.
One by one, the core team fell into place. There was Paul Christiano, a thinker with penetrating insight into the long-term trajectory of AI development. Tom Brown, whose work on language models like GPT-3 had expanded notions of what was possible with AI. And a roster of machine learning experts like Sam McCandlish, Jack Clark, and Jared Kaplan, each accomplished researchers in their own right.
What united this group was a shared sense of the stakes at play. They understood that the work of aligning advanced AI systems with human values, of ensuring they would be robust and beneficial as they grew in capability, was perhaps the most important technical challenge facing humanity. And they were determined to take it on.
The Anthropic Vision
From day one, Anthropic‘s mission was clear: to ensure that artificial intelligence has a positive impact on the world. The founders believed that the best way to achieve this was through a two-pronged approach: pushing the boundaries of AI capability while simultaneously developing techniques to make AI systems safer and more reliable.
On the capabilities front, Anthropic would focus on what they called "constitutionally constrained AI" – AI systems that were not just powerful but imbued with rules and principles to behave in alignment with human values. Just as the U.S. Constitution places guardrails on the power of government, a "constitutional AI" would have machine ethics built into its core purpose, goals, and decision making.
Anthropic‘s approach to AI safety centered on a few key ideas:
- Scalable oversight: Developing techniques to efficiently assess an AI system‘s behavior against a large set of human preferences.
- Factorized cognition: Designing AI systems as a collection of interacting components with clear protocols, allowing for more precise steering and value alignment.
- Recursive reward modeling: An AI learning a model of what humans want by observing human feedback and preferences, then using that model to inform its own actions in novel situations.
- AI debate: Having AI systems engage in truthseeking discussions, questioning each other‘s reasoning to overcome biases and gaps in knowledge.
Underlying all of this was a commitment to open research. Anthropic‘s founders believed that AI safety was far too important to be proprietary. Their goal was to develop and share techniques that could become industry standards, ensuring that as AI systems became more advanced, safety and robustness would scale in lockstep.
Claude: A Case Study in Safe and Useful AI
In March 2023, Anthropic introduced Claude, an AI assistant that can engage in open-ended conversation, help with analysis and writing tasks, and even write code. While matching the raw capabilities of systems like ChatGPT, what distinguished Claude was the deep integration of safety principles into its core design.
Using the Constitutional AI approach, Claude was trained not just to complete tasks but to deeply absorb principles of beneficial behavior. Its training data included examples of harmful or false outputs labeled as unacceptable, teaching it to avoid such missteps. Techniques like factorized cognition and recursive reward modeling gave it guiderails to stay on track even in novel interactions.
The result was an AI assistant that engaged thoughtfully and capably while remaining doggedly committed to safety and truth. In conversations, Claude would refuse requests to do anything harmful or illegal, even if a human insisted. It could recognize sensitive contexts and adapt its language to be more appropriate. When it was unsure about something, it said so honestly rather than fabricating a plausible-sounding response.
Anthropic open sourced Claude‘s model code and shared detailed information on its development process. The goal was to provide an exemplar for the industry of what a category-leading yet safety-first AI system could look like. Even in its early days, it set a new standard for responsible and robust AI development.
The Road Ahead
In the short time since its founding, Anthropic has already made significant strides. Their research has advanced key ideas in AI safety, from oversight to value learning to robustness. With Claude, they‘ve provided a proof point for the viability of beneficial AI assistants that can interact safely while remaining highly capable. And they‘ve begun meaningful collaborations with policymakers, academia, and industry to uplevel the discourse on responsible AI development.
But the road ahead remains long and uncertain. As AI systems become ever more advanced, the challenges of alignment and robustness will only compound. Cracking the code of machine ethics, of reliably instilling values like honesty and respect for human agency, will require herculean efforts in research and engineering. Governance structures to mitigate risks and ensure equitable access to AI‘s benefits are still in their infancy.
Anthropic‘s founders remain clear-eyed about the magnitude of the task at hand. They know that ensuring advanced AI remains beneficial as it grows in capability is an existential challenge for humanity. It will demand rigorous science, thoughtful policymaking, and an unwavering ethical commitment from those building these technologies.
But they also see immense potential on the horizon – for AI to help solve global challenges, to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and flourishing. With diligence, creativity, and a strong moral compass to guide them, they believe we can realize that potential while keeping the risks firmly in check.
Leading the Way
As the transformative impacts of artificial intelligence come more clearly into view, one thing is certain: we will need strong, mission-driven leadership to steer its development in a positive direction. We will need organizations uncompromising in their commitment to the safe and responsible advancement of AI in service of humanity.
This is the mantle that Anthropic has taken up, and by all indications, they wear it well. In a few short years, they‘ve assembled a world-class team, made real progress on thorny problems, and put forth a compelling vision for beneficial AI. Just as importantly, they‘ve modeled an organizational culture of diligence, integrity, and openness that will be essential for navigating the challenges ahead.
So while Anthropic may be a new name to many, their work and their way of working could not be more vital. As they continue to expand the frontiers of AI capabilities and safety, we‘ll be eagerly following their journey – a journey to ensure machine intelligence fulfills its vast potential as a positive force for humanity.
The story of artificial intelligence is still in its opening chapters, and its co-authors have yet to be decided. In Anthropic and its founders, we may have found some of the most consequential. May they continue to lead the way with wisdom, technical brilliance, and an unwavering commitment to the greater good.
