New AI battle: White House vs. Anthropic

The White House and Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, are in a war of words over AI regulation. Jack Clark, Anthropic's cofounder and policy head, recently shared a short essay titled "Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear." It argues that too many people are pretending that AI cannot threaten humanity, and that we need to acknowledge a different reality before figuring out how to "tame it and live together." White House AI czar David Sacks responded by claiming that "Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering." The fight is as much about state-level regulations as it is federal ones. The White House supported a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI laws, proposed as part of the Big Beautiful Bill negotiations, arguing that 50 different rules in 50 different states would sow chaos and slow innovation. Anthropic called the moratorium "too blunt" and, after it failed to become law, endorsed a major piece of AI legislation in California.