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Big Technology Podcast · 3 min · Jul 30, 2025

Anthropic publishes safety policies for rivals to adopt

Dario Amodei says Anthropic shares safety policies and research to give internal advocates at rival labs a model to follow. He cites responsible scaling, interpretability, constitutional AI and danger evaluations.

Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei is CEO of Anthropic.

Co-founded Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude; earlier led OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3 research.

  • Alex Kantrowitz, Host · Founder, Big Technology

    Former BuzzFeed News senior tech reporter and author of Always Day One.

About this segment

Dario Amodei says Anthropic shares safety policies and research to give internal advocates at rival labs a model to follow. He cites responsible scaling, interpretability, constitutional AI and danger evaluations.

From “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: AI's Potential, OpenAI Rivalry, GenAI Business, Doomerism”, Jul 30, 2025. Watch the full episode

“So the way the race to the top works is you set an example for how the field works.”
Dario Amodeiat 55:04 · Big Technology Podcast55:04

Takeaways

  1. Anthropic was first to publish a responsible scaling policy, he says.
  2. Public policies gave advocates at other companies a case to make internally.
  3. The company shares interpretability and safety-evaluation work.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 3:28AI timelines hinge on an exponential, not an AGI label6:22
  2. 29:46Each model can make money while the company spends at a loss6:46
  3. 58:51Safety needs to advance alongside increasingly capable AI6:31
  4. 11:36Context windows can cover some continual-learning gaps3:43
  5. 16:13Anthropic kept fixed pay levels during Meta's recruiting push4:08
  6. 23:34Enterprise customers may value model improvements more than consumers2:49
  7. 36:35Open weights do not make AI models work like open-source software3:38

  8. 53:54Anthropic publishes safety policies for rivals to adopt2:56

Up next · Lex Fridman PodcastNature's structure may make hard problems learnable6:56

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 53:59

    he's the only one who can build this safely. And therefore, speaking of that word control, wants to control the entire industry. What do you think about that? I've never said anything like that that's an outrageous lie that's the most outrageous lie I've ever heard um by the way I'm sorry if I got Jensen's words wrong but no no no the words were correct okay the but but but what he's saying but the words are the words are outrageous in fact I've said multiple times and I think anthropics actions have shown it that um you know we're aiming for something we call a race to the top you know I've said this on podcasts over the years, and I think Anthropic's actions have shown it, where, you know, with a race to the bottom, right, everyone is competing to like, you know, get things out as fast as

  2. 54:45

    possible. And so I say when you have a race to the bottom, it doesn't matter who wins, everyone loses, right? Because you make the unsafe system that, you know, helps your adversary or causes economic problems or, you know, is unsafe from an alignment perspective. The way I think about the race to the top is that it doesn't matter who wins, everyone wins, right? So the way the race to the top works is you set an example for how the field works. You say, you know, we're going to engage in this practice. So a key example of this is responsible scaling policies.

  3. 55:22

    We were the first to put out a responsible scaling policy. And, you know, we didn't say everyone else should do this or you're bad guys we didn't you know we didn't you know kind of try to use it as an advantage we put it out and then we encouraged everyone else to do it and many and and then we discovered in the months after that that you know there were people within the other companies were trying to put out responsible scaling policies but the fact that we had done it allowed you know gave those people permission right kind of kind of enabled those people to, you know, to make the argument to leadership, hey, Anthropic is doing this, so we should do it as well. The same has been true of investing in interpretability.

  4. 56:02

    We release our interpretability research to everyone and allow other companies to copy it, even though we've... Seeing that it sometimes has commercial advantages, same with things like constitutional AI, same with the measurement of the dangers of our system, dangerous capabilities evals. So we're trying to set an example for the field, but there's an interplay where it helps to be a powerful commercial competitor.

  5. 56:28

    I've said nothing that anywhere near resembles the idea that this company should be the only one to build the technology. I don't know how anyone could ever derive that from anything that I've said. It's just, yeah, yeah, it's just an incredible and bad faith distortion.