I’m not the first to tell you Anthropic filed their S-1 this week; it’s been half of my feed, too.
I read through it on Monday morning. The risk factors section of a filing like this tends to be the most interesting — Hamilton Nolan had a great piece this week walking through it — but my attention kept snagging on every mention of regulation and safety.
Anthropic has long made introspective pro-safety and regulation stances part of its brand identity. Iterations of the same statement appear all over their website, summed up by this one in Claude’s Constitution:
Anthropic occupies a peculiar position in the AI landscape: we believe that AI might be one of the most world-altering and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet we are developing this very technology ourselves. We don’t think this is a contradiction; rather, it’s a calculated bet on our part—if powerful AI is coming regardless, Anthropic believes it’s better to have safety-focused labs at the frontier than to cede that ground to developers less focused on safety. Anthropic also believes that safety is crucial to putting humanity in a strong position to realize the enormous benefits of AI.
This company has set itself proudly on a pedestal as a leader of safety as well as advancement. It publicly called for regulation and rallied around safety bills at the state level — preferable ones. Anthropic publicly opposed SB 1047 in California, an AI safety bill Governor Newsom vetoed in 2024, but they publicly endorsed the far weaker SB 53 that took effect this year.
It will be interesting to read any Frontier AI SEC disclosure, where they’re legally bound to tell the whole truth. The inevitability of this document that required thorough explication of AI’s safety risks was in the back of my mind while we watched Anthropic’s CEO affirm his own whistleblower last month. It was impossible to deny safety concerns with an S-1 draft on file confirming them.
It’s also good PR for Anthropic to be loudly self-aware of safety risks, and create tangible reference points (like supporting SB 53) to prove they’re serious about addressing them. It casts the company as trustworthy to a suspicious public. At the same time, it’s clear that Anthropic does not want AI regulation taken out of its own hands. Politico reported that representatives of Anthropic have been moving in silence on Capitol Hill to promote its own regulatory bill — it proposes government ability to block the release of a model if there was imminent risk of it killing “more than 50 people.” Which, wow. I think that says more than any way I could analyze it.
The company weighed the risk — included in the S-1 — of its political activity and advocating for regulation, and concluded it was a worthwhile one.
The political environment and our engagement with policymakers and public positions on AI regulation and safety could subject us to heightened scrutiny, political backlash, or disproportionate regulatory action.
Our commitment to responsible and safe AI development includes active engagement with policymakers, regulators, and other stakeholders regarding the development of AI-related laws, regulations, and standards. We have participated in, and will likely continue to participate in, political processes, including through contributions, advocacy, or support of political organizations. In addition, our executives and other representatives have publicly expressed and may in the future publicly express views on AI policy, regulation, safety, and related social or political issues.
The risk, according to Anthropic, is opening itself to further scrutiny from the public or targeted retaliation from the government. President Trump has famously referred to Anthropic as an “out-of-control, Radical Left AI company,” and its relationship with this administration has been publicly tenuous — although CEO Dario Amodei was in attendance at Trump’s AI executives summit last month, and the two had a private dinner together beforehand where they reportedly discussed AI regulation. Specifics of that conversation were never made public.
A few other statements from the S-1 regarding safety, regulation, and Anthropic’s political activity:
Concerns have been raised both within our organization and by other researchers, regulators, policymakers, and industry participants that sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy.
As part of our political engagement, we have advocated for, and will likely continue to advocate for, regulatory approaches or industry standards that we believe promote the safe and responsible development of AI but that could increase our compliance burdens, limit our product development or deployment flexibility, or otherwise slow our growth relative to competitors.
Any safety-related controversy or incident, whether actual or perceived, and regardless of fault or frequency, could prove significantly damaging to our business.
Regulators have and could continue to use our disclosures as the basis for heightened scrutiny or more stringent requirements applicable to us compared to less transparent competitors.
We have also advocated, and expect to continue to advocate, for regulation and oversight of frontier AI, including industry-wide standards primarily relevant to the use of AI to accelerate AI development, so that AI capabilities do not advance faster than the safety, alignment, and security practices needed to support them, and we have proposed working with the U.S. government and other frontier AI developers to establish safety standards. Regulatory or other measures of the kind we advocate, if adopted, would apply to us and could increase our compliance burdens, limit our product development or deployment flexibility, affect how and when we develop or release new models, or otherwise slow our growth.
There is no assurance that policymakers will adopt the approaches we support, and our advocacy has in the past drawn, and may continue to draw, criticism, heightened scrutiny, or other challenges.
There are a few things that are especially interesting to me: the acknowledgement of existential danger was inevitable in this filing, and a reminder that Anthropic has more incentive than ethics to mitigate it; obviously, if an AI catastrophe reshapes the world, it reshapes the company, too. Anthropic acknowledges regulation as a potential risk to business and its advocacy as heightening that risk. And, Anthropic says even perceived instances of safety catastrophes could affect it negatively. Good PR matters, especially for an industry that’s largely mistrusted by the American public.
That all brings me to the coming election in which data centers and AI regulation have become mainstream issues. We at Hard Reset have been keeping an eye on Anthropic money in the 2026 elections; My colleague Alex Shultz has written throughout the month about recent political donations to conservative causes by Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown. I wrote about AI policy’s role in the San Francisco congressional race, in which millions in Anthropic corporate donations were funneled through a PAC to one of the candidates, Scott Wiener (who happens to have written the two aforementioned California bills). Because of the deniability political action committees provide, and the technicality of how money was moved around within the PAC, Wiener got away with his repeated defense of the donation: “There is no Anthropic money in this race.”
There is Anthropic money in races across the country, in large part via Anthropic’s corporate PAC of choice, Public First Action — which describes itself as “a bipartisan organization designed to educate Americans on key AI issues and advance an AI policy agenda supporting safeguards” — and the bipartisan candidates that PFA is using Anthropic’s donations to promote say they’re in favor of regulation.
A week from the election, Anthropic stayed consistent with characteristic pro-safety rhetoric in its S-1 filing. It allocated millions towards electing candidates of choice, very intentionally directing that money through political action committees. All the while quietly lobbying for its own regulation framework federally, with a track record of opposing strong safety measures and endorsing more moderate ones.
I’m not exactly comfortable with Anthropic’s altruistic motives for its political activity. Will Anthropic-financed candidates support or prioritize Anthropic-written bills? How much power over how AI is regulated in the United States will be determined by one frontier company saying it wants to mitigate existential risk, and what advantages and flexibility will it allow itself? Regulation is hardly regulation if a company wins its own preferences for external oversight.
And a public show of humanitarian proclivity is a nice bonus.