In a year of truly exhausting media narratives, nothing has broken my heart quite like the treatment of Anthropic. The plucky artificial intelligence startup is currently preparing for its initial public offering—the Silicon Valley equivalent of awards season—and by all rights, this should be their moment. They have done the work. They have built the models. They have courted the right institutional investors. Yet, instead of celebrating a triumphant debut, the discourse has turned shockingly cruel.
I was reading through the company’s S-1 prospectus in the back of a town car on my way to a screening this week, and the vulnerability on display was staggering. Buried in the risk disclosures, Anthropic’s founders bravely admitted that their business could be adversely affected by "recurring narratives concerning the potential adverse societal impacts of AI," specifically calling out the media’s fixation on the "existential" risks of their product.
It was a stunningly raw admission of how much the haters are getting to them. And honestly? I get it.
I was having a chopped salad with my agent at the Polo Lounge recently when the topic of the Anthropic IPO came up. He looked exhausted. Do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain positive tracking for a multi-billion-dollar tech launch when the cultural critics absolutely refuse to stop bringing up the eradication of the human species? It is the definition of a bad-faith critique. Every major release has stakes. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer had stakes, and nobody asked him if his IMAX prints were going to spontaneously incinerate the audience.
It is incredibly demoralizing for the talent to spend six months optimizing a large language model, only to have the trades focus entirely on whether it will eventually decide carbon-based life is a mathematically inefficient use of grid power.
Chaz is entirely right. In Hollywood, we call this kind of toxic media coverage bad word-of-mouth, and it can kill a project long before opening weekend. How is Anthropic supposed to build a cohesive comeback narrative for the tech sector when the press insists that their product might permanently end the concept of coming back?
We have completely lost the ability to separate the art from the artist, and the artificial intelligence from the terrifying autonomous military applications. We treat a 400-page SEC filing as an invitation to nitpick, rather than what it is: a visionary piece of personal storytelling about a company’s journey toward liquidity.
I am told by a source close to the production that the internal mood in San Francisco is incredibly tense. The executives are just trying to execute a flawless, joy-filled press tour. But every time they sit down with a journalist, instead of being asked about their creative process or what it was like to collaborate with Amazon on a cloud computing deal, they get hit with a gotcha question about whether their software will accidentally collapse the global financial system.
It is cancel culture at its most insidious. We are preemptively canceling a company for an apocalypse that hasn’t even happened yet.
We just want the work to speak for itself, but it is nearly impossible to get the green light on new data centers when the media is deliberately weaponizing the literal survival of humanity against our valuation.
If we keep punishing companies for the hypothetical eradication of the human race, we are going to stifle innovation entirely. The box office for generative AI is already wobbly enough without the press dogpiling on the founders just because their proprietary algorithm might occasionally hallucinate a recipe for a bio-weapon.
We demand perfection from our corporate titans, but the moment they ask for a little grace regarding the potential extinction of all living things, we tear them down.
The next time you feel the urge to tweet a snarky comment about Anthropic’s risk disclosures, take a breath. Ask yourself who you are really hurting. Is it the faceless machine intelligence that will soon render your job obsolete? Or is it the dedicated team of publicists, reps, and founders who just want to ring the opening bell on Wall Street in peace?
Let them have their moment on the red carpet. If humanity is going to end, the least we can do is let the people responsible enjoy their sweet, sweet rollout.