is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
One night in May 2020, during the height of lockdown, Deep Ganguli was worried.
Ganguli, then research director at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, had just been alerted to OpenAI’s new paper on GPT-3, its latest large language model. This new AI model was potentially 10 times more advanced than any other of its kind — and it was doing things he had never thought possible for AI. The scaling data revealed in the research suggested there was no sign of it slowing down. Ganguli fast-forwarded five years in his head, running through the kinds of societal implications he spent his time at Stanford anticipating, and the changes he envisioned seemed immeasurable. He knew he couldn’t sit on the sidelines while the tech rolled out. He wanted to help guide its advancement.
His friend Jack Clark had joined a new startup called Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees concerned that the AI giant wasn’t taking safety seriously enough. Clark had previously been OpenAI’s policy director, and he wanted to hire Ganguli at Anthropic for a sweeping mission: ensure AI “interacts positively with people,” in everything from interpersonal interactions to the geopolitical stage.
Over the past four years, Ganguli has built what’s known as Anthropic’s societal impacts team, a small group that’s looking to answer the thorniest questions posed by AI. They’ve written research papers on everything from AI’s economic impact to its persuasiveness, as well as explorations of how to mitigate elections-related risks and discrimination. Their work has, perhaps more than any other team, contributed to Anthropic’s carefully tended reputation as the “safe” AI giant dedicated to putting humans first.
But with just nine people among Anthropic’s total staff of more than 2,000, in an industry where mind-boggling profits could await whoever’s willing to move quickest and most recklessly, the team’s current level of freedom may not last forever. What happens when just a handful of employees at one of the world’s leading AI companies — one that nearly tripled its valuation to $183 billion in less than a year, and is now valued in the range of $350 billion — are given the blanket task of figuring out how the ultra-disruptive technology is going to impact society? And how sure are they that executives, who are at the end of the day still looking to eventually turn a profit, will listen?
““We are going to tell the truth.”
Nearly every major AI company has some kind of safety team that’s responsible for mitigating direct, obvious harms like AI systems being used for scams or bioweapons. The goal of the societal impacts team — which does not have a direct analog at OpenAI, Meta, or Anthropic’s other big competitors — is broader. Ganguli sees his job as finding “inconvenient truths” about AI that tech companies have incentives not to publicize, then sharing them with not only Anthropic leadership, but the rest of the world.
“We are going to tell the truth,” Ganguli said. “Because, one, it’s important. It’s the right thing to do. Two, the stakes are high. These are people. The public deserves to know. And three, this is what builds us trust with the public, with policymakers. We’re not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. We’re just trying to say what we’re seeing in the data.”
The team meets in the office five days a week, spending a good amount of time in Anthropic’s eighth-floor cafeteria, where Saffron Huang, one of the research scientists, usually grabs a flat white before a working breakfast with Ganguli and others. (“That’s the Kiwi in me,” says Huang, a New Zealander who founded a nonprofit in London before joining Anthropic in 2024.) Team members work out together at the gym and have late nights at the office and day trips to the beach. They’ve met each other’s mothers and ridden in each other’s cars while picking up their kids from school. They see so much of each other that Ganguli sometimes forgoes after-work hangouts — “I see you all more than my family!” a team member recalls him saying.
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