--- title: "Anthropic Drops Its Huge Safety Pledge That Was Supposedly the Whole Point of the Company" description: "Anthropic updated its Responsible Scaling Policy that drops a central safety commitment made in the original version of the document." date: "2026-02-27" modified: "2026-02-27" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-drops-safety-pledge" categories: - "Anthropic" - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Anthropic Drops Its Huge Safety Pledge That Was Supposedly the Whole Point of the Company ![Dario Amodei is seated on an upholstered armchair. He is wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a patterned tie. His hands are clasped together in front of him. The background features an orange grid pattern with a large red circle behind him. The image has a stylized, graphic design effect.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source; Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images* In 2021, a splinter group of former OpenAI employees [founded a new startup, Anthropic](), to pursue building AI models with a renewed focus on safety, after feeling that their employer had gone astray. OpenAI itself was originally founded on beneficent principles and a commitment to transparency, but then took billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft and made its tech closed-source, prompting the exodus. Now, Anthropic may be heading down the same path of its rivals. On Tuesday, it revealed a [new version]() of its Responsible Scaling Policy that drops its core safety commitment first made in 2023: to stop training and refuse to deploy an AI system if it couldn't guarantee it had proper safety guardrails in place that met stringent internal standards. The new sentiment among the company's leadership is that this has become an unneeded chain around its foot. "We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models," Anthropic's chief science officer Jared Kaplan [told *TIME* in an interview](). "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments... if competitors are blazing ahead." The updated policy, it's fair to say, flagrantly contradicts the organization's entire *raison d'etre*. Anthropic has presented itself as the adult in the room in an industry dominated by outrageous boosterism and a flippant attitude towards ethics. Its carefully crafted safety-centric image is no better exemplified by CEO Dario Amodei's [mythologizing]() that in the summer of 2022, he made the call to abstain from releasing Anthropic's powerful AI model he knew would change the world because he was too worried of its risks; months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and stole all the headlines. So why the drastic reversal? Anthropic provides several reasons in its announcement. One of them is an "anti-regulatory political climate." Amodei has long pushed for stronger AI regulations, an ambition that more or less went up in smoke once the Trump administration took charge. In particular, he criticized Trump's attempt to [impose a sweeping ban on states' ability to pass their own AI regulation]() — meaning that AI companies would only be beholden to much weaker federal laws — earning Amodei [frequent attacks]() by administration figures, who have accused him of fear-mongering. And so with no robust legal framework forthcoming, there was nothing binding its competitors to play by the same rules that Anthropic purports to. That, Anthropic argues, means that any safety research and measures it conducted would by default be outdated as its the rest of the industry continued to build even more powerful models. "If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe," it argued in its new policy. "The developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research." Perhaps there's a kernel of truth to that logic. But it's a spurious justification for Anthropic to drop a central pillar of its safety act. Anthropic indeed cannot control what its competitors do, but is that reason to stop even pretending to lead by example? Regulatory climates, after all, can change. And calls for AI safety will not go away. Arguably, they'll only mount as the industry's contradicting promises become more obvious and the risks the technology poses become even more consequential. The timing of the policy change can't be overlooked, either. Ethical as it may purport to be, Anthropic enjoys a $200 million contract with the Pentagon it signed last summer to deploy Claude across the military. But that critical money faucet is now in jeopardy, as Trump officials reportedly [threatened to cut off Anthropic]() over the company's insistence that its tech shouldn't be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth met with Amodei on Tuesday, and gave the CEO an ultimatum, [*Axios* reported](): lighten Anthropic's AI safeguards to make them more amenable to the military, or the Pentagon will either cut off the company and declare it a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to share its AI technology. But if the new policy is a capitulation by Anthropic, Kaplan, the chief science officer and co-founder, doesn't see it that way. "I don't think we're making any kind of U-turn," Kaplan told *Time*. **More on Anthropic:** [*Anthropic Furious at DeepSeek for Copying Its AI Without Permission, Which Is Pretty Ironic When You Consider How It Built Claude in the First Place*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()