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All-In · 3 min · Oct 30, 2026

Anthropic’s RSI push may split its safety allies

David Sacks · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

David Sacks argues Anthropic is using its own models to accelerate recursive self-improvement, despite its calls for pacing.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 26:18Anthropic’s enterprise revenue still has room to scalePro pick 6 min
  2. 46:42AI borrowing could create risk across the whole economy4 min
  3. 1:03:31Google’s cloud growth offsets uncertainty in search4 min
  4. 6:40Anthropic’s reported $80B loss was not cash burn4 min
  5. 11:15AI customers may earn multiples of their model spend4 min
  6. 1:07:54Google’s ad auction may be overcharging advertisers3 min
  7. 43:17Anthropic’s RSI push may split its safety allies3 min
  8. 36:44Governments may regulate access to compute rather than chips4 min
“There's no single company in the world that is doing more to race towards full RSI.”
David Sacksat 43:48 · All-In
43:48

Takeaways

  1. Sacks says Anthropic uses models to improve future models.
  2. He cites 26% of model-development tasks using RSI in August.
  3. He expects tension with groups most concerned about runaway RSI.

About this segment

David Sacks argues Anthropic is using its own models to accelerate recursive self-improvement, despite its calls for pacing. He sees that tension as a possible source of conflict with groups most concerned about RSI.

David Sacks, Host

Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

From “Anthropic S-1 Shocker, Greatest Business Ever? Google’s $500B Wipeout, Midterm Predictions”, Oct 30, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

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

  1. 43:20

    them going public will actually right-size them in the public consciousness. And one thing you're seeing already actually is there's starting to be a Doomer-Anthropic split. There's a very interesting article in Vox, which is this huge Doomer publication over the past week, and it was quoting a bunch of these NGOs, kind of Doomer NGOs, that were basically pointing out that, you know, like Anthropic, actually, if you separate their rhetoric from what they actually do, they are the ones leading the charge on recursive self-improvement. There's no single company in the world that is doing more to race towards full RSI.

  2. 44:00

    than Anthropic. They are hell-bent for leather on getting to full recursive self-improvement. In fact, a lot of the reason why they are becoming so efficient with their compute, the reason they're able to cut costs, offer the same capability at one-tenth the price, is because they've increasingly been using their own models to generate these algorithmic improvements, to create these compute multipliers. If you go back to August, Anthropic published a very interesting blog talking about how they were using RSI.

  3. 44:31

    And 26%, they had a chart showing that 26% of their tasks that are involved in basically trying to create the next generation of models, they were already were using RSI to do that. Now, that was back in August. So who knows what they're at now being in October. So look, they are pursuing RSI very, very quickly. And, you know, one way to think about that whole pacing letter that Dario published a few months ago is it's almost like they're creating an alibi for themselves where they are acknowledging that, hey, we are pursuing RSI as quickly as anyone.

  4. 45:09

    And it's almost like they're saying to the world, well, we want it to stop, right? Like we want it to slow down. We tried to get you all to agree to pace, but you guys wouldn't agree to do that. So therefore we kept going, you know? And it's almost like creating an alibi in advance for themselves if this RSI thing goes really bad. All right. But I think that they had to know when they published that pacing letter that they're not going to get the whole world on board with pacing.

  5. 45:36

    So the whole thing was sort of an exercise in virtue signaling. But in any event, I think what it shows, again, is I do think that it's possible that an anthropic Doomer split is coming because there's no way for them to maintain their lead as the number one superintelligence company without continuing to advance the frontier very rapidly and to continue to pursue recursive self-improvement. And that is something that the Doomers are most afraid of, of all the various risks, right? They are most worried about a breakaway superintelligence.

  6. 46:13

    So I do think that this is the beginning, maybe, of a divorce between Anthropic and the Doomers. But we'll see. Okay, let's get back to your breakdown, Chamath.