The New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his reporting on Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company behind the large language model Claude. They talk about Lewis-Kraus’s visits to the company’s San Francisco headquarters, what drew him to its research on interpretability and model behavior, and how its founding by former OpenAI leaders reflects deeper fissures within the A.I. industry. They also examine what “A.I. safety” looks like in theory and in practice, the range of views among rank-and-file employees about the technology’s future, and whether the company’s commitment to building safe and ethical systems can endure amid the pressures to scale and compete.

This week’s reading:

“What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
“Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?,” by David D. Kirkpatrick
“Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show,” by Kelefa Sanneh
“Listening to Joe Rogan,” by David Remnick
“What Do We Want from a Protest Song?,” by Mitch Therieau

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Can Anthropic Control What It's Building?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker