nthropic might be risking the thing that makes it Anthropic.

On Tuesday, the company announced changes to its Responsible Scaling Policy, the framework that prevents Anthropic’s models from being released without proper safety and security measures.

The biggest change? The company has struck the pledge to hold back its models if Anthropic can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance of release. Additionally, the company is now no longer preventing itself from training models above a certain level without certain safety measures.

In an interview with Time, Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan said that it “wouldn't actually help anyone” for it to stop training AI models. “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.”

Some of the highlights from the new version of the policy include:

• Anthropic meeting or exceeding the “overall risk reduction posture” of competitors
• Delaying development if Anthropic is already considered to be in the lead on AI development and models in production are considered to carry catastrophic risk
• Commitments to release “risk reports” every three to six months to remain transparent about the safety issues its models may face
• Introducing “frontier safety roadmap,” describing concrete plans for risk defenses across security, alignment, safeguards and policy

Even with the changes, Anthropic is still standing firm in the ongoing dispute over its models being used for warfare: After a meeting with CEO Dario Amodei on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly giving the company until Friday to roll back its AI safety guardrails for its chatbot, Claude. Anthropic has two major ethical boundaries: For its models to not be used for fully autonomous targeting in military operations or for the surveillance of U.S. citizens.

If Anthropic continues to refuse, the Pentagon will label the firm a “supply chain risk” and invoke the Defense Production Act, giving the agency access to Claude “regardless of if they want to or not,” according to CNN.

But not all AI firms have the same reservations: On Monday, xAI struck a deal with the Pentagon to use Grok in classified systems, including weapons development and battlefield operations.

Our Deeper View

Though holding out against the use of its models for acts of warfare still gives it the ethical high ground, with so much attention and cash flowing into Anthropic, the company loosening its tight safety standards felt inevitable. As Harvey Dent says in The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” While Anthropic isn’t a “villain” by any stretch of the imagination, it continues to face situations that challenge its moral compass, chipping away at its position as the poster child for ethical conduct in AI. In the interview with Time, Kaplan denied that this move was financially motivated. But fewer restrictions will allow the company to innovate faster and fit in better with the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley. We just thought that was the mindset Anthropic was created to oppose.