While the AI company has sought to underscore areas of alignment with the administration, White House officials supporting a more hands-off approach to AI have chafed at the company’s calls for caution.
“If you have a major member of the industry step out and say, ‘Not so much. It’s OK that we get regulated. We need to figure this out at some point,’ then it makes everyone in the industry look selfish,” said Kirsten Martin, dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
“The narrative that this is the best thing for the industry relies upon everyone in the industry being in line,” she added.
This tension became apparent earlier this month when Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark shared a recent speech on “technological optimism and appropriate fear.”
He offered the analogy of a child in a dark room afraid of the mysterious shapes around them that the light reveals to be innocuous objects.
“Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet,” he said. “But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come.”
“And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade,” Clark continued. “And they want to get us to turn the light off and go back to sleep.”
Clark’s remarks were quickly met with a sharp rebuke from White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who accused Anthropic of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering” and fueling a “state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”
He was joined by allies like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who replied to the post on the social platform X with “Truth.”
Sunny Madra, chief operating officer and president of the AI chip startup Groq, also suggested that “one company is causing chaos for the entire industry.”
Sriram Krishnan, a White House senior policy adviser for AI, criticized the response to Sacks’s post from the AI safety community, arguing the country should instead be focused on competing with China.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded last week to what he called a “recent uptick in inaccurate claims about Anthropic’s policy stances,” arguing the AI firm and the administration are largely aligned on AI policy.
“I fully believe that Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing: to ensure that powerful AI technology benefits the American people and that America advances and secures its lead in AI development,” he wrote in a blog post.
Check out the full report at TheHill.com.
