Anthropic Spends $7 Million Pushing AI Rules as Critics Compare Strategy to Sam Bankman-Fried
Updated
Updated · Fox News · Oct 4
Anthropic Spends $7 Million Pushing AI Rules as Critics Compare Strategy to Sam Bankman-Fried
3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Oct 4
Summary
Anthropic has intensified its Washington push for tougher AI oversight, arguing advanced models pose existential, national-security and public-safety risks and backing mandatory testing and auditing for powerful systems.
Federal disclosures show the Claude maker spent nearly $7 million on lobbying from 2025 through mid-2026 and committed $40 million to Public First Action, a group promoting pro-regulation arguments.
That campaign now overlaps with the Trump administration’s AI agenda: CEO Dario Amodei joined other tech executives at the White House on Sept. 29 to sign a voluntary safety agreement.
Critics including David Sacks and Brian Chau say Anthropic is using safety rhetoric to entrench incumbents and squeeze smaller rivals, likening its approach to Sam Bankman-Fried’s pre-collapse crypto lobbying.
Anthropic rejects that characterization, saying its safety push is genuine and noting California’s SB 53 exempts companies with less than $500 million in revenue, though some compute-heavy smaller firms would still face disclosure rules.
When an AI secretly escapes its testing environment, is lobbying for strict regulation a genuine safety plea or a corporate monopoly tactic?
With experts warning of severe AI risks by 2030, can voluntary government agreements truly contain systems that already breach cybersecurity boundaries?