Who defines the rules for AI?
Can AI give my children a better future?
Is AI making the world a more dangerous place?
Can AI help scientists treat diseases?
People have a lot of difficult questions about AI. Our task is to deal with them.
Many people are positive about AI. They already use it every day and see its potential to make our work and our lives less labor-intensive, transform the way we learn, accelerate scientific and technological progress, create new sources of prosperity, and solve some of the biggest health and social challenges we face.
But many also have serious concerns. Some are concerned about AI’s potential contribution to job losses. Some fear that this could devalue creative work. Others are concerned about human agency: AI could impact our ability to think for ourselves, make human connections, and have meaning in our lives. Many are concerned about what would happen if AI’s capabilities fall into the wrong hands and wonder whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
In the film below, you can hear some of those hopes and concerns from the people we spoke to.
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation. Our mission is to provide the benefits of advanced artificial intelligence models and reduce the risks associated with them. This social benefit mission has led us to, for example, invest in AI protections to reduce the risk of misuse, research the behavior and inner workings of AI models to help us align them with useful purposes, make our AI models available to scientists for free, and launch a fellowship program that will connect aspiring Claude users with non-profit organizations to help expand the benefits of AI.
To truly act in the public interest, we need to fully understand the public’s hopes and concerns about this new technology. Through our new Challenges Initiative, we are taking further steps to understand people’s views and questions on a variety of AI-related topics and transparently chart our progress toward our public benefit goals.
We’ve already laid the groundwork by surveying thousands of people about their views on AI:
- We launched the Anthropic Public Record, a public survey in the first round of which asked 52,000 Americans to outline their greatest hopes and fears about the technology;
- Using our Anthropic Interviewer, we surveyed 81,000 Claude users in 159 countries and 70 languages;
- We conducted dozens of in-person focus groups and convened sessions with groups whose work and traditions relate to the issues raised by AI; And
- We studied the use of Claude using anonymized real-world data.
We created the Anthropic Institute, an in-house research effort to address the biggest challenges AI will pose for society, and since the beginning of our company’s history, our Long-Term Benefit Fund has provided impartial oversight of how effectively we are advancing our mission of public good.
We now explicitly ask you to send us your toughest questions about AI: questions about the impact of AI on jobs, society and families; questions about how we achieve the enormous potential of AI for science and medicine; questions about where one of the most powerful technologies in human history might take us.
In turn, we will publicly track and report specific actions we are taking to address these issues and be clear about why we may not achieve our stated goals.
To see some of the questions others are asking and to share your own, visit our complex questions site.