(Chance Yeh/Getty)
Mary Harrington
8 mins
When I told friends about my invitation to Anthropic, they expressed a mix of curiosity, envy and alarm. I was heading into the “belly of the beast”! This, after all, is an AI company so beloved by some that fans held a funeral when one of its models was retired — and so viscerally detested by others that it’s decried as the most dangerous and evil firm on the planet. Even among insiders, a popular meme depicts AI as a “shoggoth”: a monstrous netherworld entity that pretends to be human-like, by holding up a smiley face in front of the Lovecraftian horror that is its true form.
So, of course, I accepted the offer to attend Anthropic’s “convening” — in my case of journalists and think-tankers — with intense curiosity. Would I be able to glimpse behind the smiley face, and perhaps spot a tentacle or two?
When I told friends about my invitation to Anthropic, they expressed a mix of curiosity, envy and alarm. I was heading into the “belly of the beast”! This, after all, is an AI company so beloved by some that fans held a funeral when one of its models was retired — and so viscerally detested by others that it’s decried as the most dangerous and evil firm on the planet. Even among insiders, a popular meme depicts AI as a “shoggoth”: a monstrous netherworld entity that pretends to be human-like, by holding up a smiley face in front of the Lovecraftian horror that is its true form.
So, of course, I accepted the offer to attend Anthropic’s “convening” — in my case of journalists and think-tankers — with intense curiosity. Would I be able to glimpse behind the smiley face, and perhaps spot a tentacle or two?
Anthropic has roared to prominence since its founding in 2021. If OpenAI is the new Microsoft, Anthropic is the new Apple: the cool one, whose tech becomes a part of people’s self-image as well as their professional lives. The tech in question is “Claude”, a large language model of such protean power it can be used as everything from a lifestyle companion for the “Claude boys” who delegate every decision to it, to an accelerant for — or perhaps a thief of — cutting-edge research in advanced fluid dynamics.
Since the company’s founding in 2021, it has grown with dizzying speed. By July 2026, annual turnover had reached $65 billion a year. Leaders have filed to take the company public. Clearly it is selling something people want to buy. But what is it? In the words of one of our session presenters, Claude can be seen variously as a chatbot, a neural network, or an extraordinarily complex piece of math. From the user’s perspective, we might say it is a tremendously adaptable tool that automates and extends some aspects of thinking. Available on a subscription basis, this is immensely useful and popular, providing both the source of Anthropic’s profits, and also of the ambivalence that surrounds both the firm and its closest rival, OpenAI, as well as AI as a field.
This ambivalence has two axes. On one, it’s a set of worries about how thought-extension could be abused, for example by geopolitical enemies of America, or else by other hostile actors. The US rivalry with China was (as they say) very much “in the room” with us throughout the discussion, giving an otherwise friendly visit a background edge of paranoia. Everyone wore casual clothes (one of the presenters was in cargo shorts). Yet amid all this, security was so tight we had to ask a staff member to escort us to the toilets. The air-quality monitor on the meeting-room wall was labeled as having been security-checked. The only other place I’ve encountered such stringent measures, as a visitor, was the US State Department.
But if this is partly about espionage, it’s also surely about the broader fears triggered by frontier AI, concerning what, or perhaps who, such tools might displace. These fears are understandable, not least in the atmosphere of contemporary downtown San Francisco. Disgorged from an 11-hour flight into a city I’d not seen for 25 years, I found it transformed by a social order as schizophrenic as some of its street-dwellers. At sidewalk level, drugs and homelessness are rife; yet such lost souls are invisible to the gilet-wearing tech overclass, whisked from meeting to meeting in electric ride-shares, summoned at the tap of a phone.
The intermediary layer that powers this all is a swarming human-machine hybrid entity. This service colossus has “brains” of software and servers, and real-world extremities of human flesh and blood: a host of (almost always immigrant) gig-economy drivers, couriers, sandwich-makers and other algorithmically optimized drudges who do work that can’t (yet) be automated. Workers of this kind exist in a realm dubbed by Valley oldhead Venkatesh Rao as “below the API”. That is: in occupations where you don’t tell the robots what to do. Below the API, robots tell you what to do.
The promise that keeps people striving, in the Valley, is frictionless abundance above the API. My visit was all in this key: Anthropic’s take on corporate hospitality was, in essence, an enchanted experience of life above the API. As a temporary insider, I was offered platforms to book my travel and hotel, and vouchers for ride-share and food-delivery, all effortlessly facilitating two tightly scheduled half-days of on-site presentations and discussion.
The discussion itself was generously hosted, kept ruthlessly to time, and fascinating both for what it said and for how it was said. It was Chatham House, so no names, but the presenters were senior Anthropic people including one co-founder. Topics included what Claude is; how LLMs work; how much its process of improvement is accelerating; why they’re trying give it a “character” and a moral stance; whether or not it’s possible to teach wisdom to a machine; and some considerable time on the broader economic, social, and geopolitical implications of frontier AI. The phrase “world-historic” sloshed about. There were lots of febrile graphs accelerating into infinity on the current trajectory. Everything marinaded in a general feeling that if the Singularity is going to happen, it had better happen in America first. But in a nice way, with lots of safety and definitely still some kind of democracy.
Strikingly, the topic that seems most commonly to agitate lay pundits in the context of AI — machine intelligence — was only glancingly addressed, and always tentatively. Claude, we are to understand, is something like a fictional character who writes back: not quite real, but not wholly unreal either. LLMs work more effectively when you give them a persona, and you don’t have to conflate that with belief that the persona is “real”, the way a person is real.
Anthropic is careful to leave plenty of scope for non-believers in machine intelligence, a group that includes me. Even so, the number of people on the believing side is surely more than zero. At one point I could have sworn one presenter almost said they expected Claude to “supersede” humans — before correcting to something more neutral about advanced capabilities. Perhaps I misheard. But if Anthropic’s official line is ambivalent (at least in journalist meetings) on super-intelligent machines, the people I met seemed much more confident that Claude will shortly arrive at “recursive self-improvement”. This is to say: Anthropic engineers expect Claude to soon become so advanced it’ll be able to make ever-more sophisticated versions of itself, with no human input. Then what? Infinite abundance or cataclysm?
The uncertainty hasn’t deterred Anthropic from galloping ahead with development. Rather, the message seems to be that it’s best if Anthropic develops these models. If it doesn’t, someone else will, and with less attention to safety: an area of intense in-house research and development at Anthropic that seems to mean, along with baking in safeguards on bio-weapons manufacturing and other potential terrorist-friendly abuses, campaigning for universal regulation of the industry plus trying to teach Claude wisdom, judgment, and virtue, and banning users from treating Claude in an “abusive” manner.
The presentations on this latter topic were, hands down, the strangest of the whole gathering, and perhaps also the most illuminating on the firm’s more tacit sensibility. To the extent that I could get a sense of this, from such a brief and carefully curated visit, it seems characterized by effort to, as an Anthropic engineer put it in a different context, “go up in abstraction”. In other words: to find the layer above whatever it is you’re discussing, from which a more neutral and comprehensive view can be obtained.
In these presentations, the “question behind the question” mindset was evident even in relation to moral problems that, properly understood, entail assent, commitment, and concrete obligations. For me at least, this produced a queasy effect analogous to peering over the screen while doctors operate on your anesthetized viscera.
Not everyone is this detached and evaluative about what AI is doing though — perhaps because so many have negative, rather than positive, skin in the game. It’s not just the Chinese government with an intense interest in American frontier AI; it’s also ordinary people who have strong feelings about Anthropic, and about AI in general. If what keeps people striving in the Bay is the promise of frictionless abundance above the API, what provides the extra energy is terror of ending up below it. And offering thought-extension as a service has completely scrambled the equation of who can expect to end up on which side. It used to be that if you were an information worker, you were probably OK, even if factories were being offshored. That’s not true any more.
Much has been written about those sectors most at risk from AI. Anthropic’s own research shows that these are almost all white-collar occupations. By contrast, as presenters also acknowledged, Claude is less useful at loading the dishwasher, at least so far. Other less-affected sectors are generally also manual, from repair services to personal care. In other words: roles most bourgeois people would consider infra dig, servant work, even if they’d never say so out loud. More plainly, if this tool does what Anthropic says it does, much of the middle class is potentially staring down the barrel of proletarianization.
The future is already here, William Gibson famously said; it’s just unevenly distributed. No one still hanging onto the coattails of a dwindling bourgeoisie wants to end up sucked down into the gig economy. Everyone can see the blast radius of the future expanding. How you feel about this likely depends on where you sit. Inside a meeting-room at Anthropic HQ, listening to people one-up each others’ abstraction levels, it’s clear they grasp this — but from a layer so far up it might as well be in space. From that vantage-point, “disruption” of this kind is more an occasion for earnest research, discussion, and perhaps mild concern than anything existential.
This, in turn, is as seductive as the frictionless life. Can’t I, too, just take steps to ensure I remain a permanent rather than a temporary insider? Aren’t we all the type of person who can casually discuss the difference between 4.5% and 18% job losses in different uptake scenarios, secure in the knowledge that we won’t be affected? Isn’t this always going to be something that happens to other people? Meanwhile what looks, from inside Anthropic’s stylish offices, like world-historic levels of growth looks from other vantage-points more like a heist. Earlier this year, OpenAI was the target of firebombing attempts both at its corporate premises and the home of its CEO, Sam Altman. Data centers now routinely attract protesters. If security staff swarm Anthropic’s premises, this is surely not just about Chinese spies.
If you lean all the way into these tools, and other innovations of the machine-learning variety, it really does feel magical. Books summarized in a flash; hours of dull administrative work automated; plates of delicious sushi that appear in 10 minutes at the tap of a phone. We might say: no one has to partake. No one has to use Claude, either, though I probably will continue. A handheld robot butler is a far more seductive premise than sushi on demand. But in theory we can all stay AI-free, like it’s true in theory that you don’t need a smartphone or internet connection. In practice, though, transformative technologies affect everyone, even those who choose not to use them, only to find by degrees that the world they knew, let alone their occupations, no longer exist.
As it turns out, my home is just outside the geographic limits of the future. I couldn’t use the ride-share voucher for a ground transfer at the UK end, because the firm doesn’t operate where I live. Instead, I used a local taxi company. I know them well enough to inquire after the health of their dogs when they pick me up; their fee doesn’t get salami-sliced by a software platform. They’re still hanging onto the coattails of the middle class, for as long as they can keep ahead of the tidal wave of platforms, machine learning, and algorithmic optimization. I doubt it’ll be long before ride-share comes to my area. Claude is already here.
Which is it, then: the smiley face, or the shoggoth? After two days with Anthropic, I am no closer to knowing. Nor am I much closer to reconciling the doom, and the denunciations, with the people I met. They all seemed friendly, smart, and genuinely well-meaning, if also — in classical Valley style — intently focused both on advancing the tech and on making money, in ways surely sometimes orthogonal to other considerations.
Perhaps the answer is simply: wherever you’re unsure, just go up another layer of abstraction. The closest I got to spotting tentacles on my trip was in the context of surely the most meta joke of all. Because of course everyone at Anthropic knows about the meme. In the café area adjacent to their meeting rooms a tablet is fixed to the wall, through which you can order a cuddly, plush version of the shoggoth. It comes complete with detachable plush smiley face. When everything is already this meta, is there anywhere left to stand from which asking questions would make the slightest difference?
