How Will Anthropic Navigate a Trump Presidency?

Lately, AI developer Anthropic has been riding high, with its models’ impressive performance on tasks like code generation helping it to poach customers from its larger rival, OpenAI. What many people haven’t realized, though, is how Anthropic might be disadvantaged in the upcoming Trump era.

Anthropic has connections to the effective altruism movement, which emphasizes the dangers of AI over short-term profit or productivity benefits. These positions could rub President-elect Donald Trump the wrong way, since he’s pledged to repeal President Joe Biden’s AI executive order because it “hinders AI innovation” by putting too many restrictions on AI companies.

And on a more personal level, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei has been quite vocal about his feelings towards Trump and his support of his opponent, Kamala Harris, on his personal Facebook page. 

In a November 2018 post, Amodei said that “Trump represents a serious and legitimate threat to the rule of law,” and that Democrats were at a disadvantage because they would need to win a much larger percentage of the popular vote to have the same level of influence as Republicans, due to the “geography of the urban-rural split,” according to screenshots we viewed.