Anthropic’s Special Role

Among the AI experts that fled Open AI, when it reduced its focus on AI governance,  Dario Amodei and his company Athropic deserves special mention in AI Middle Way.  The commercial company is so fully aligned with ethical perspectives that it has actually been funded by foundations from their endowment, including Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation, and Nathan Cummings Foundation which collectively purchased nearly 50,000 shares of Anthropic from the FTX bankruptcy proceedings. While these three foundations' collective investment is noted as "limited in size," they established mission-aligned positions as shareholders focused on promoting corporate practices that protect the public interest.

Anthropic has raised a total of $33.7 billion since its inception in 2021 with major investors being institutions like Google, Amazon, and various venture capital firms.

Advocacy for AI Regulation

Among the “little tech”  companies that emerged from Palo Alto’s San Hill Road,  Anthropic has been the most vocal about promoting regulation of AI. The company has actively advocated for targeted oversight through several channels:

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) is not intended as a substitute for regulation, and the company argues that enforceable regulation is important because society will demand reassurance that AI companies are keeping to their promises..

Anthropic became the first major tech company to endorse California's SB 53 bill, which aimed to  create broad legal requirements for large AI developers, including requirements to create publicly shared safety-focused guidelines and strengthen whistleblower protections.

Based on its experience with RSPs, Anthropic identifies three elements as key for effective AI regulation: transparency, incentivizing better safety and security practices, and simplicity.

Additionally, Anthropic has advocated for ambitiously funding the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support its AI measurement and standards efforts, viewing this as complementary to other policy tools for stronger AI governance

So while foundation funding for Anthropic appears to have been relatively modest and equity-based rather than grant-based, the company has genuinely positioned itself as an advocate for meaningful AI regulation—sometimes putting it at odds with deregulatory perspectives from its peers.