Anthropic investor says AI firms are inflating risks to influence policy

An investor by the name of Lonsdale, whom the article gives a surname and nothing else, has accused OpenAI and Anthropic of inflating safety risks in order to shape policy. He called it 'very dangerous' — quite a charge to bring against two firms whose entire commercial identity rests on the proposition that the danger is real. His specific objection is narrower and rather funnier: 'we don't want an oligopoly that controls all of our policy here with the government.' Nobody wants that, no. The interesting part is that everyone at the table is an oligopolist.

The timing is worth a look. In early September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk argued for tighter controls on advanced AI systems — three men who collectively sit atop a serious slice of the world's compute, arguing that compute should be harder to come by. Nothing self-serving there at all. And Anthropic, as we noted recently, gave 80 of 261 pages of its IPO prospectus to the catastrophic and existential risks of its own product — a third of the paperwork, which is either extraordinary candour or a moat with a bibliography.

Because that is what risk language does now: it sells twice. Once to the enterprise buyer who wants to be told the model is terrifying but tamed, and once to the legislator who gets to write the definition of 'advanced AI system' — a definition that will arrive as a compliance bill on every lab too small to afford it. Lonsdale has said the game out loud, which is more than the prospectus managed in 80 pages. He is also an Anthropic investor, so his objection may be to the price of membership rather than the existence of the club. Either way, the safety argument and the market argument have quietly become one argument, and nobody at the table has an incentive to say so.