Anthropic is launching The Anthropic Institute, a new initiative designed to tackle the most pressing challenges that advanced AI will present to societies worldwide. The Institute will leverage research from across Anthropic to deliver information that external researchers and the general public can use as the world transitions toward significantly more powerful AI systems.
In the five years since Anthropic's founding, AI progress has advanced at a remarkable pace. It took the company two years to release its first commercial model, and only three more to develop models capable of discovering severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, handling a broad range of practical tasks, and even beginning to speed up the pace of AI development itself.
Anthropic predicts that even more dramatic progress will arrive in the next two years. A core conviction at the company is that AI development is accelerating-improvements are compounding over time. As a result, extremely powerful AI, like the kind Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei envisions in Machines of Loving Grace, is approaching far sooner than many anticipate.
If that prediction holds, society will soon need to grapple with a host of massive challenges. How will powerful AI reshape jobs and economies? What new opportunities for greater societal resilience will it create? What threats will it amplify or introduce? What are the expressed "values" embedded in AI systems, and how should society help companies determine the appropriate ones? And if recursive self-improvement of AI systems begins to occur, who should be informed, and how should these systems be governed?
The Anthropic Institute's mission is to share with the world what Anthropic is learning about these challenges as it builds frontier AI systems, and to collaborate with external audiences to help address the risks that must be confronted. Whether societies can meet those challenges will determine whether transformative AI delivers the radical upsides that Anthropic believes are achievable in science, economic development, and human agency.
The Institute is led by Anthropic's co-founder Jack Clark, who is taking on a new role as Head of Public Benefit. It features an interdisciplinary staff of machine learning engineers, economists, and social scientists, bringing together and expanding three of Anthropic's existing research teams: the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests AI systems to understand the outermost limits of their capabilities; Societal Impacts, which studies how AI is being used in real-world settings; and Economic Research, which tracks AI's impact on jobs and the broader economy. The Institute will also incubate new teams and is currently pursuing work on forecasting AI progress and understanding how powerful AI will interact with the legal system.
The Institute holds a unique vantage point: it has access to information that only the builders of frontier AI systems possess. It will leverage this fully, reporting candidly about what Anthropic is learning about the technology it is developing. At the same time, the Institute is intended to be a two-way street-engaging with workers and industries facing displacement, and with people and communities who sense the future approaching but are uncertain how to respond. What the Institute learns from these interactions will inform its research agenda and how Anthropic as a whole chooses to act.
The Anthropic Institute has made several founding hires:
- Matt Botvinick, a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School and previously Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind and Professor in Neural Computation at Princeton, is joining to lead the Institute's work on AI and the rule of law.
- Anton Korinek is joining the Economic Research team, on leave from his position as Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, to lead an effort studying how transformative AI could reshape the fundamental nature of economic activity.
- Zoë Hitzig, who previously studied AI's social and economic impacts at OpenAI, is joining to bridge Anthropic's economics work with model training and development.
The Anthropic Institute is also hiring, building out a small analytical staff to synthesize various parts of its research agenda and communicate its findings to the world. More details are available on Anthropic's careers page.
Expansion of Anthropic's Public Policy Team
Alongside the launch of The Anthropic Institute, Anthropic is expanding its Public Policy organization.
The Public Policy team focuses on areas where Anthropic has established priorities and perspectives, including model safety and transparency, energy ratepayer protections, infrastructure investments, export controls, and democratic leadership in AI. Sarah Heck, who joined Anthropic as Head of External Affairs, will lead this team as Head of Public Policy. Prior to Anthropic, Sarah served as Head of Entrepreneurship at Stripe, a financial technology firm, and previously led global entrepreneurship and public diplomacy policy at the White House National Security Council.
Anthropic is growing its Public Policy team to help inform and shape AI governance globally. The company is opening its first office in Washington, D.C. this spring and rapidly expanding its international policy presence. Current openings can be found here.