Anthropic Pushes States for Tougher AI Safety Rules

Anthropic's embrace of stringent AI regulation sits at odds with its position as a high-valuation startup. The company was founded with the mission to ensure the world safely navigates transformative AI, and as it has grown into a major player, it has leaned into supporting some of the nation's harshest proposed rules on frontier AI companies. These rules are framed as mitigating catastrophic risks—including the possibility that advanced models could contribute to financial disasters or mass deaths—though critics in Silicon Valley interpret the political strategy differently.

The tension centers on the definition of "large AI model developer." Anthropic's Cesar Fernandez argues that the thresholds in supported legislation (generally companies with hundreds of millions in development spending and over $500 million（約800億円） in revenue) are so high that startups cannot reach them easily. Yet in a capital-intensive AI landscape, a handful of well-funded competitors—Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, and Mistral—have already raised billions of dollars. The accusation from figures like former White House AI czar David Sacks is that Anthropic is using regulatory frameworks to entrench its own advantage while appearing to act in the public interest. Anthropic counters that any company powerful enough to build dangerous AI systems should face the same regulatory burden, framing it as a "race to the top" in safety rather than a competitive move.

Where Anthropic draws firm lines is revealing. The company opposes giving states (rather than the federal government) the authority to block AI model deployments, and it resisted the Trump administration's export controls on its own Mythos and Fable 5 models. This suggests that while Anthropic is willing to accept robust auditing and transparency requirements, it wants to avoid fragmented, state-by-state deployment restrictions that could impede its business. Meanwhile, the company has mounted far less political pressure on regulations addressing voter concerns like job displacement or data center impacts—issues that would require greater structural compromise from the entire industry.