If you go to the home page of Anthropic, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups working on cutting-edge AI models, it says, “At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being.” There are also nice phrases about “responsible AI” and working for “human benefit”.
In a leaked memo that the company’s CEO sent to its employees, however, the company revealed its intentions to seek investment from the Gulf states, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Given their habit of butchering oppositional journalists and operating semi-feudal monarchies, the latter are not exactly mascots for “human benefit”.
In a lame attempt to paper over this glaring contradiction, the Anthropic CEO states, “Unfortunately, I think ‘no bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
Not coincidentally, this comes on the heels of Trump touring the Gulf states to shore up economic relations between the U.S.A. and the Arab monarchies. During this tour, Trump was joined by the likes of Elon Musk and the CEOs of OpenAI and Nvidia, all of whom are in a race to secure investments and data centers for AI development.
Anthropic, having initially been left out, is now playing catch-up. Hence, the same CEO who once claimed that “democracies” need to be in control of AI development “to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian [sic] countries” is now arguing for the need to accept capital from “authoritarian” countries “to stay on the frontier” of AI development!
This follows a general trend where CEOs, particularly in tech, play up their “progressive” credentials for PR purposes but are all too eager to discard their smiling masks when the bottom line gets affected. Human rights are human rights but business, alas, is business.
