After portraying itself as a safety and responsible AI-first model provider for years, Anthropic’s decision to scale back its AI safety pledge and loosen its “Responsible Scaling Policy” reflects economic and political pressures it is facing and a need to be flexible to survive in the AI market.
Anthropic’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, told Time Magazine this week it will no longer adhere to the commitment it made in 2023 to never train an AI system unless it is certain that adequate safety measures are in place. According to Kaplan, Anthropic made the shift to stay competitive in the turbulent AI market.
Instead, Anthropic will now commit to clearly showing enterprises how its models perform in safety tests.
Kaplan’s revelation came as the AI model provider is seeing significant growth in the use of its Claude models, despite competition from archrival OpenAI.
However, that growth is at a tipping point due to the current battle Anthropic is fighting with the U.S. Department of Defense. Defense department officials have said in recent days that Anthropic could become a “supply chain risk” because the generative AI vendor does not want its technology used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons systems. If Anthropic can’t resolve its problems with the defense department, it could lose its government contracts and access to commercial partners that do business with the Pentagon.
Government Pressure
Losing some or all of its lucrative government contracts would be a dramatic setback for Anthropic. It would also represent a significant shift in the AI market from at least one vendor standing securely on safety to all vendors chasing innovation, as few AI vendors strongly prioritize the safe use of AI. Meanwhile, regulation of AI technology in the U.S. is nearly non-existent.
“Governments domestically, but also in large parts around the world, aren’t really going about aggressively regulating this technology,” said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago. He added that many AI vendors have free rein to innovate as quickly as they want. Therefore, Anthropic senses a risk that, if it fails to innovate, another AI vendor not committed to safety will take the lead.
“They’re effectively saying, ‘Hey, we need to keep going in this race. The government’s not really helping. Competitors are not taking our suggestion here. So, let us not check ourselves at this rate when others are not doing it,'” Bennett said.
Moreover, the regulatory landscape in the U.S. has shifted from relatively small but significant steps toward AI regulation at the federal level under former President Joe Biden to President Donald Trump’s emphasis on unbridled innovation and opposition to regulation, highlighted by his December executive order that blocks states from passing their own AI laws.
Because of the changed regulatory climate, a portion of Anthropic’s enterprise customers will likely sympathize with the vendor’s AI safety policy change, Bennett said.
“Many of the clients, or some of their clients, at least, who are committed to the spirit of the Responsible Scaling Policy will understand that Anthropic is still holding a line when it comes to more controversial applications [of its technology],” he said. “The policy shift does not necessarily mean that Anthropic becomes an immoral actor in the space.”
The RSP is Anthropic’s framework that sets measurable levels of AI models’ capabilities and lays out mandatory safety protocols, including development pauses if standards are violated.
Moreover, some enterprises are not so focused on safety. Rather, they want to use Anthropic’s popular Claude Code agent to build software, said Jeff Pollard, an analyst at Forrester Research.
“They want to be able to write more code, write better code, write code faster, and the potential safety and security underpinnings of that might have been a nice thing to have, but I don’t think they were a must-have for very many of those customers,” Pollard said.
A Business Decision
But Anthropic’s decision to reduce its emphasis on AI safety will likely still have some consequences.
“I am a little concerned about Anthropic’s move,” said Lily Li, an AI risk, data privacy and cybersecurity lawyer and founder of Metaverse Law, which focuses on privacy, AI, and cybersecurity law for the digital economy. “I completely understand why the company is doing what it’s doing in the face of these dual threats, but I am concerned because a lot of people, myself included, do favor AI models that have strong safeguards.”
“The more you water down these public representations of safety, it actually might, in the long run, hurt the bottom line,” Li continued.
But Anthropic will likely remain a top AI vendor that prioritizes safety and security, Pollard said.
“If we believe that this is a core part of Anthropic’s value … if we want companies to have that aspiration in the market, then we need Anthropic to survive,” he said.
The weakening of the safety policy might even lead to Anthropic’s next powerful model, Bennett said.
“If they have the kind of momentum that the last release suggests,” he said, referring to the significant updates to the Claude model family over the past year. “Then you may see a more powerful next Claude version … that may also encourage some of its competitors to do whatever they can to accelerate their development,” he said.
Moreover, the prospects for AI are not completely dead, Li said. Some states, such as Colorado, are shifting focus from AI tool developers to users.
The Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act took effect on Feb. 1 and regulates the deployment of AI tools to prevent discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, and finance.
