Anthropic’s Safety Campaign: Public Interest or Competitive Moat?

Anthropic has made AI safety central to its identity.

The company publishes a Responsible Scaling Policy, advocates for frontier-model governance, supported California’s SB 53, and announced a £15 million-equivalent $20 million contribution to Public First Action, an advocacy organisation supporting targeted regulation of risks such as AI-enabled biological attacks and cyberattacks.

These efforts should not automatically be dismissed. Advanced AI creates real risks. Governments need technical expertise, model evaluations, incident reporting, transparency, and enforceable accountability.

But responsible leadership also requires us to ask who benefits from the proposed rules.

A regulation may appear neutral while imposing costs that only the largest laboratories can absorb. Requirements involving massive evaluations, specialised compliance teams, extensive reporting, legal review, and costly security programmes may be manageable for a company valued in the hundreds of billions. They may be prohibitive for a university laboratory, open-source community, nonprofit, or startup.

This is how a safety standard can become a competitive moat.

The contradiction is subtle. A frontier laboratory can sincerely believe that stronger rules are necessary while also benefiting when those rules raise barriers around the market it already occupies. Public interest and corporate advantage can exist in the same policy proposal.

That is why the question should not be whether Anthropic is “for safety” or “against innovation.” The better question is whether the resulting regulatory system is proportionate, evidence-based, independently governed, and open to competition.

Regulators should listen to AI companies, but they should not outsource policy formation to them. Governments need their own technical expertise. Civil society, independent researchers, small businesses, workers, and open-model developers must also have a meaningful role.

Good regulation should reduce measurable harm without preserving the power of a few incumbent laboratories.