[L]ately, Anthropic has been in the headlines for less noble reasons: It’s pushing back on a landmark California bill to regulate AI. It’s taking money from Google and Amazon in a way that’s drawing antitrust scrutiny. And it’s being accused of aggressively scraping data from websites without permission, harming their performance.
It was supposed to be different from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In fact, all of Anthropic’s founders once worked at OpenAI but quit in part because of differences over safety culture there, and moved to spin up their own company that would build AI more responsibly.
An AI company may want to build safe systems, but in such a hype-filled industry, it faces enormous pressure to be first out of the gate. The company needs to pull in investors to supply the gargantuan sums of money needed to build top AI models, and to do that, it needs to satisfy them by showing a path to huge profits. Oh, and the stakes — should the tech go wrong — are much higher than with almost any previous technology.
I get what you mean, but the way it’s being used is actively and visibly corrosive to the societies we live in, and has been used to intentionally undermine factual reporting and societal cohesion in a lot of subtle ways, which can and has negatively impacted our ability to deal with literally any other topic. So yeah, though it’s not as direct a cause as the things you mentioned, I would absolutely still rank it up there.