Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some of the people responsible for studying AI and deciding in what ways it might well ruin the world. Those folks work at Anthropic as part of its societal impacts team, and Hayden just spent some time with them for a profile she published this week. It's just nine people out of more than 2,000 who work at Anthropic, and their only job, as the team members themselves say, is to investigate and publish, quote, 'inconvenient truths' about how people are using AI tools, what chatbots might be doing to our mental health, and how all of that might be having broader ripple effects on the labor market, the economy, and even our elections.
Of course, that kind of work brings with it a whole host of problems. The most important, of course, is whether the societal impacts team can remain independent or even exist at all as it publicizes findings about Anthropic's own products that might be unflattering or politically fraught. And politically fraught is a real thing. There's a lot of pressure on the AI industry in general and Anthropic specifically to fall in line with the Trump administration, which published an executive order in July banning so-called 'woke AI.' If you've been following the tech industry, the outlines of this story will feel familiar. We've seen this most recently with the social media companies and the trust and safety teams responsible for doing content moderation. Meta went through endless cycles of this, where it dedicated resources to solving problems created by its own scale and the unpredictable nature of products like Facebook and Instagram. And then after a while, it seemed like the resources dried up, or Mark Zuckerberg got bored or more interested in MMA fighting or just cozying up to Trump, and the products didn't really change to reflect what the research showed.
We're living through one of those moments right now. The social platforms have all uniformly slashed investments into election integrity and other forms of content moderation. And Silicon Valley as a whole is working closely with the Trump White House to resist meaningful attempts to regulate AI. So as you'll hear, that's why Hayden was so interested in this team at Anthropic. It's fundamentally unique in the industry right now. In fact, Anthropic is a bit of an outlier in the entire AI industry because of how amenable CEO Dario Amodei has been to calls for AI regulation, both at the state and federal level. Anthropic is also seen as the most safety-first of the leading AI labs because it was formed by former research executives at OpenAI who were worried that their concerns about AI safety weren't being taken seriously. There's actually quite a few companies formed by former OpenAI people worried about OpenAI, Sam Altman, and AI safety. It's a real theme of the industry, but Anthropic seems to be taking it to the next level.
So I asked Hayden about all this, about all the pressures being put on the AI labs, about Anthropic's reputation within the industry in favor of regulation and AI safety, and how that all impacts the societal impacts team, and whether it can really meaningfully study and even perhaps influence AI product development, or if, as history suggests, this will just look good on paper until it quietly goes away. There's a lot here, especially if you're interested in how AI companies think about safety from a cultural, moral, and business perspective. One quick note before we start: we're running a special end-of-the-year mailbag episode of Decoder later this month where we answer your questions about the show, who we should talk to, what topics we should cover in 2026, what you like, what you hate, all of it. Please send your questions to
[email protected] and we'll do our best to feature as many as we can. Okay. Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on the team at Anthropic that's trying to keep AI from destroying the entire world. Here we go.
Hayden Field, you are a senior AI reporter here at The Verge. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
I'm excited to talk to you. I feel like there's a lot of variations of the AI story, a lot of sub-stories within the big story, and kind of at the top of the list is: will it kill us all? It seems like the most important story, maybe a little undercovered, but you just wrote a big piece on Anthropic, the team inside Anthropic that is trying to prevent the AI from killing us all. There's some political considerations with trying to prevent AI from killing us all, which are fascinating. And then there's the work itself. So describe what your story is about and that team at Anthropic and what they're up to.
Yeah, I've been fascinated by this team for a while. It's called the Societal Impacts team, and it's a group of now only nine people compared to Anthropic's staff of like more than 2,000, and they're solely tasked with figuring out the societal impact that this technology is going to have on all of us. So it's just crazy to me that so few people are tasked with this huge, thorny question of how AI is going to impact us as a society all over the world, how it's going to impact our jobs, our brains, our democratic election processes, basically everything. Obviously, the company also has a trust and safety team, safeguards team, people that are working on safety throughout. But when it comes to societal impacts, it's mostly this group. And no other AI lab has a so-called societal impacts team. They have people that are thinking about these questions, sure, but it's just interesting to me that out of all the AI labs, there's only this one team that's working on just this, and that it's so few people compared to the larger staff. I think that maybe helps them get past some red tape, but it's also just crazy how few people there are.
I want to come to why this team is at Anthropic of all companies. Obviously, Anthropic has kind of a deep history thinking about AI safety, but just step back. What is a societal impact team? Do they just sit around in a conference room thinking about all the bad things that could happen? Like, how do they work?
So basically what happens is they look at a lot of data. They try to figure out how people are using Claude, which is Anthropic's chatbot. They try to figure out how people are thinking about Claude and other chatbots and how that's going to impact the economy and jobs, how that's going to impact elections, you know, like are people trusting chatbots too much? Are chatbots giving inaccurate answers to people's questions about different politicians? Which human values, that's their term, should AI models hold, if at all? And also how it's being misused in the wild.
The reason I brought up Anthropic and where the company came from is that there were a bunch of people who left OpenAI because they were kind of AI doomers, right? They didn't think OpenAI was being safe enough. They certainly thought Sam Altman and OpenAI were being reckless in deploying AI technology. So you set up Anthropic to be the safe one. There's quite a significant trend of people leaving OpenAI to start a safer AI company. But then there's a part of me that says having a societal impact team is just wishcasting, right? You have a team inside the company whose entire job is to say that AI will change everything and here's all the potential impacts, and that's just going to help you sell more AI. Is that a dynamic inside of the company? Do they see that as a criticism?
I think what's interesting about all these companies and their safety teams, or so-called safety teams of any kind, whether it's, you know, this team, whether it's a safeguards team, a trust and safety team, whatever it's called, it's better than not having them because a lot of times they are putting out research that is impacting the whole industry. And if you look at some of the most concerning headlines this year in AI that, you know, makes it to the general public, a lot of that research came from Anthropic's societal impact team. So I mean, they're doing good work, but the question is why do these teams even exist inside these companies? Yeah, you know, maybe executives care about safety, but I also think the other part of it no one talks about is that it's a way to kind of avoid federal regulation. They can say, 'Hey, look, we're regulating ourselves. We're doing good. We're putting research out there that exposes the bad stuff about AI. We don't need you to regulate us.' And of course, Anthropic has called for more state-level regulation, and you know, they've publicly been more pro-regulation than some AI companies in terms of like their soapbox. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, most AI labs' safety teams, whatever they're called, are a way for them to point internally and say, 'Hey, we're already doing this ourselves. You don't need to regulate us,' whether on a state or federal level.
I see the existence of a team whose entire job is to generate studies that say we'll need 50% less lawyers in the future as a way to market AI to law firms. But the goal of this team is to uncover, quote, 'inconvenient truths' about AI. What are some of those inconvenient truths? Do they lay them out for you?
Yeah. And that's why I think this team is so interesting compared to other kind of safety or safeguard or trust and safety teams in the industry because the type of research they're putting out can be damning and they are allowed to still put it out, at least right now. That's why it's so fascinating to me. I could see a team at another company, which again, no other company has a team like this, but a safety team at another company, I could see certain things being changed or tweaked to kind of put the company in a better light. Right now the societal impacts team has a lot of freedom. They are able to just publish inconvenient truths, which is their goal. I don't know how long that's going to last, but I do know that it's the case right now. So one example is they were able to study Anthropic's own safety monitoring systems and kind of publicize the big gaps. Like they found people were using Claude to create explicit pornographic stories with graphic sexual content. They found a network of bots that were kind of trying to create SEO-optimized spam. They also found like coordinated misuse at individual conversation levels that was kind of flying under the radar. They found stuff about how Claude can offer biased opinions that don't really represent the diverse global perspectives on really important issues. So yeah, they've been putting out pretty damning stuff sometimes, and the company has let them do it so far.
Can you give us some examples of the kinds of reports this team has put out that are maybe not so great for Anthropic or paint AI in a more negative light?
Completely. So they've done a lot of stuff on how to mitigate elections-related risks, discrimination, AI's ability to persuade people of things, its economic impact. They did something on how Claude could potentially provide like personal opinions on election things, like controversial political topics, different politicians, maybe even inaccurate answers, and also a lot of stuff just about the economic impact of AI and which jobs it was most likely to take, which types of companies are adopting Claude first, how much they're doing with it. So yeah, basically how chatbots can affect people's brains, election processes, jobs, you know, their own opinions in terms of AI's ability to persuade you of things. And you know, they say that they're going to do a lot more research also on AI psychosis and other types of like emotional connections with chatbots over the next six months.
What do you think the wildest impacts that they've predicted have been?
I think the craziest impacts have honestly been election-related stuff, like how these models can have personal opinions, quote-unquote, about different political topics or candidates, and sometimes they're totally wrong or sometimes they're just really skewed. The other impact that I thought was really interesting was just the fact that these safeguards that these companies say are like pretty ironclad aren't. We saw that with OpenAI saying that, you know, its safeguards break down over long conversations, and there have been a ton of lawsuits in that regard with, you know, teens dying by suicide, other young people falling victim to, you know, pretty problematic chains of thought. And with Anthropic, I mean, we've also seen this team highlight the gaps in their own safeguards. We know people can get around these voluntary safety frameworks pretty easily. And I think that's one of the most intense things that they've highlighted. It's just no matter how much work you do to try to keep people from misusing your system, one, you can't, and two, you don't know what happens when they leave the platform. And so you may think you're stopping some harms, but at the end of the day, you may not have impacted it at all. So I think that's something they've highlighted. And you know, it's something for us all to think about.
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
We're back with Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field. Before the break, we were discussing Anthropic's societal impacts team, how it works, and some of its most interesting findings so far. But now I want to dig into the broader dynamics of the AI industry and ask why a company like Anthropic has earned a reputation that sets it apart from OpenAI and other competitors. So let me make the specific comparison to OpenAI. OpenAI, they have a trust and safety team. They say they care about it. But famously, Helen Toner was on the board of OpenAI. She was on the board of the nonprofit. She published a paper criticizing some AI safety concerns. Sam Altman was very mad at this paper, and you can point to that as the beginning of the rift that led the board at OpenAI to fire Sam Altman and then rehire him, and then they all had to quit. That is a pretty tense situation, right? The board member of the AI company publishes a paper critical of AI, OpenAI falls apart for I don't know 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever it was, and is then put back together in a totally different way. Obviously, that's not the dynamic at Anthropic. Is that just because Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cares about it? Is it because the company bills itself as caring more about safety? Where does that culture come from?
I think it's both. So I do think, you know, obviously the whole mission behind Anthropic, the whole lore behind it is that research executives left OpenAI because they felt like it wasn't being safe enough and they wanted to do it in their own way. Now, does that mean they care? Yeah, they care more than many people, but it's also really good for business to care about this stuff. So, for example, Anthropic's business has been growing at a pretty high rate. You know, it just got a huge valuation in the last couple months because it's really great for business to look like you're the reputable, safe, responsible adult AI company when your clients that are giving you the most money are enterprises, governments, and academic institutions. No one wants an off-the-wall, crazy, can't-predict-it, not-super-safe AI company running off with their business data. So, I mean, it's good for business and they say it's good for the world. So I think it's really just both. Yeah. Do they care more than most people? Yeah. But it's also great for their bottom line to care and to be seen with this type of reputation.
Yeah. There's a lot of fundraising going on. I think Anthropic raised more money just recently, last month. It's a $350 billion valuation. That's in range of OpenAI. They have investors same as on Microsoft, Nvidia, and others. They are the safe one. I think that's the reputation the company has. They're the ones that don't talk about AGI as much. Although I suspect it's burbling in the background, having met some of their executives, they just don't want to say it because they don't want to be perceived as the reckless ones, right? How does that impact this societal impact team? Are they allowed to slow the company down because they're predicting these negative impacts and doing these studies that show the negative impacts, or are they just good for business and they're kind of a marketing tool?
