SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " anthropic " 627 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
AI's COVID shutdown moment: SpaceX IPO, Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia
From SpaceX's IPO to Anthropic's massive revenue number, it looks like AI just had the day when the hype became real.
AI Training For Small Businesses Goes Nationwide
Free AI training from the U.S. Chamber and new tools from Anthropic are arriving just as small business formation surges and the AI adoption gap begins to close.
CEO of Paul Allen’s $3.1B science and tech fund stepping down less than a year after launch
Dr. Lynda Stuart is departing as the first CEO of the Fund for Science and Technology, the foundation created under late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's instructions. The change comes amid broader shifts in the Allen philanthropic ecosystem, including the departures of top AI researchers from the Allen Institute for AI.
Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for AI compute
SpaceX and Anthropic have a major compute power deal valued at $1.25 billion a month, utilizing SpaceX's Colossus data centers for AI growth.
Google to release smart glasses and add AI ‘agents’ to search engine
CEO Sundar Pichai says features powered by new Gemini model will close gap with Anthropic and OpenAI
Anthropic hires former OpenAI and Tesla AI boss Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI founding member who was formerly Tesla's AI boss, announced on Tuesday that he had joined Anthropic.
KPMG integrates Claude across its core business and workforce of more than 276,000 in strategic alliance
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Marc Benioff said Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic tokens
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he's able to work faster with AI agents and that the company is working on tech to make coding easier at Slack.
Google's slimmed down Gemini model is quietly winning AI customers
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch highlights Google's Gemini Flash model's rise in AI demand, overtaking Anthropic in Vercel's AI Gateway.
Security Researchers, Aided By Anthropic's Mythos, Claim To Have Breached macOS
Apple is taking the claims seriously.
Anthropic And Gates Foundation Sign $200 Million Partnership For AI Use In Health, Education, Agriculture
The partnership commits $200 million over four years to develop AI tools for use in vaccine research, farming guidance, education and other areas.
Anthropic, Gates Foundation launch $200 million partnership for AI in health, education
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have pledged $200 million to back artificial intelligence-related public goods and areas including health and education, they said on Thursday.
Anthropic, Gates Foundation launch $200 million partnership for AI in health, education
SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Reuters) - Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have pledged $200 million to back artificial intelligence-related public goods and areas including health and education, they said on Thursday. Support from Anthropic's technical staff and usage credits for its Claude AI will account for its half of the financial commitment, while the Bill Gates co-founded Gates Foundation will provide grant funding, program design and expertise, officials told Reuters.
Anthropic forms $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Google is about to release a new Gemini model
Sources say that Google plans to announce a new Gemini model at its annual I/O conference on Tuesday. I’m told the release will land roughly in the class of OpenAI’s recent GPT-5.5. and well short of Anthropic’s Mythos, which, despite not being widely available, has reset how every lab talks about what “leading” means.
Microsoft’s multi-agent AI system tops Anthropic’s Mythos on cybersecurity benchmark
Microsoft's new vulnerability-scanning system, codenamed MDASH, scored 88.45% on the CyberGym benchmark, surpassing single-model systems from Anthropic and OpenAI by using more than 100 specialized AI agents across multiple models.
AI transformed Anthropic's workplace, coding 90% of projects, CFO says
Krishna Rao of Anthropic discusses AI's impact on automating white-collar tasks, increasing productivity, and shifting employee roles to management.
Anthropic’s latest Claude release turns your Mac into a small business powerhouse
If you run a small business from your Mac, you’ll want to pay attention to Anthropic’s latest Claude release. Claude...
Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business with QuickBooks, PayPal
The AI company says small businesses account for 44% of U.S. GDP but have lagged behind larger enterprises in AI adoption
Anthropic's Newest Claude Feature Is Here to Help Small Business Owners With Their Pain Points
Claude for Small Business will assist with payroll, the books, and more. An Anthropic exec explains precisely how.
Anthropic wants small businesses to use Claude
The company launched new tools designed for lean teams.
Anthropic debuts Claude for Small Business as it continues its enterprise software push
Anthropic is entering the small business market.
Anthropic courts a new kind of customer: small business owners
Anthropic is looking to broaden its customer base from larger enterprise customers to smaller and mid-sized businesses.
Anthropic tops OpenAI in business AI adoption for the first time
Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in AI business spending, according to Ramp's AI Index, marking a significant shift in AI adoption for the Claude creator.
Anthropic now has more business customers than OpenAI, according to Ramp data
For the first time, Anthropic has more verified business customers than OpenAI, according to this month’s AI Index from the fintech firm Ramp.
Introducing Claude for Small Business
We're launching Claude for Small Business, a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows that put Claude inside the tools small businesses use every day.
Anthropic expands legal AI tools, boosting Claude Cowork
Anthropic's new release of legal AI tools for Claude Cowork is an ambitious effort to become the law industry's new hub.
SAP and Anthropic Plan to Bring Claude to SAP Business AI Platform
SAP and Anthropic will embed Claude across SAP's AI-enabled solution portfolio, powered by Joule and Joule agents.
A Philanthropic Tree of Life: Seeding Health Equity Through Influence and Innovation
Editor’s Note: This article was first published by Grantmakers in Health here and was authored by: Gaea A. Daniel, Assistant Professor, Emory University (Direct Relief Fund for Health Equity …
Google thwarts suspected hacker attempt to use AI for large-scale exploitation
Google says it blocked hackers using AI to find a zero-day and bypass 2FA, amid Anthropic’s delayed Mythos launch.
Google says it likely thwarted effort by hacker group to use AI for 'mass exploitation event'
Hackers are rapidly adopting AI to find previously unknown software flaws even without the help of Anthropic's powerful Mythos model.
Anthropic pins Claude's blackmail on the internet's portrayal of AI
Last year, Anthropic's Sonnet 3.6 model displayed blackmail behavior, prompting a review of AI training data's influence on its actions.
Using Claude? Thank Elon Musk
Anthropic now relies on a huge SpaceX data center for AI compute, tying Claude's rapid growth and reliability to Elon Musk.
Mozilla says Anthropic's Mythos found hundreds of flaws
Mozilla says Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos AI found security flaws that automated testing systems missed for years.
Hantavirus Scramble Tests Trump’s Overhauled CDC
Plus, Anthropic’s Mythos has thrown the White House AI strategy into chaos.
Anthropic introduces "dreaming," a system that lets AI agents learn from their own mistakes
Anthropic has launched “dreaming” for AI agents, giving Claude new self-improving tools designed to boost enterprise automation, reliability, and scale.
Mozilla says AI helped squash 423 Firefox security bugs
Yet it remains unclear if Anthropic's uber model was effective, or if better model middleware is what makes the difference
How Anthropic’s Mythos has rewritten Firefox’s approach to cybersecurity
Security researchers at Mozilla say Anthropic's Mythos has unearthed a wealth of high-severity bugs in Firefox.
Anthropic updates Claude Managed Agents with three new features
Anthropic launched Claude Managed Agents last month, greatly simplifying the work required to build and deploy cloud-hosted AI agents. This...
I Am Begging AI Companies to Stop Naming Features After Human Processes
Anthropic announced “dreaming” for AI agents to sort through “memories” at its developer conference. Can we not?
Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents can now "dream," sort of
Also, rate limits will double for Pro and Max users of tools like Claude Code.
Anthropic introduces 'dreaming' technique for AI agents
Anthropic introduces 'dreaming,' a technique for AI agents to self-improve within the Claude Managed Agents tool.
Anthropic will let its managed agents dream
Anthropic is expanding Managed Agents with dreaming — a scheduled memory process — plus outcomes-based evaluation and multi-agent orchestration now in public beta.
Anthropic just launched AI agent tools to shake up finance grunt work
Anthropic introduced 10 AI agents for the finance industry on Tuesday, adding to the tools already available from buzzy startups and firms themselves.
Wall Street opens up its partnership playbook for AI
Finance giants are teaming up with OpenAI and Anthropic to help them spin up consulting arms. It's a classic strategy Wall Street has deployed before.
Wall Street's $1.5 billion plan to build the 'McKinsey of AI'
Some of Wall Street's biggest investors, like Blackstone, are teaming up with Anthropic to build a consulting firm for the AI future.
Big Tech Targets Drug Discovery with Wave of Life Science Platforms
AWS, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all unveiled specialized AI workflows that promise to accelerate scientific discovery
Anthropic Nears $1.5 Billion Joint Venture With Wall Street Firms
Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman each expected to invest around $300 million; Goldman Sachs also an investor.
Google Cloud is almost one-fifth of Alphabet’s business
Plus: Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, Musk v. Altman, Parallel, Qualcomm, Samsung, SoftBank.
Blackstone Forms New Unit to Oversee AI, High-Growth Tech Bets
Blackstone Inc. is folding its growth business into a new West Coast-based division that will focus solely on the alternative investment giant’s artificial intelligence portfolio, which includes OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
Anthropic doubles estimate for Claude Code token spend
Anthropic now says that the average cost per developer per active day is $13, up from $6 earlier this month.
Claude Gains Integrations With Adobe, Blender, SketchUp and Other Creative Apps
Anthropic today updated Claude with new connectors aimed at creative professionals, adding integrations for Ableton, Adobe, Affinity, Autodesk Fusion, Blender, Resolume Arena and Wire, SketchUp, and Splice. Connectors are tools that Claude can use to access other platforms and help with completing tasks. Anthropic says that Claude can open up new ways for creatives to work and take on larger-scale projects.
Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton
Anthropic is really leaning into creative AI services.
A startup says Cursor's AI agent deleted its production database
The founder of PocketOS said that a Cursor AI agent running on Anthropic's Claude Opus model was behind the "destructive action."
Google To Up Anthropic Investment As Cloud Giants Chase AI Business
Alphabet plans to invest $10 billion more in Anthropic and possibly up to $40 billion more. Google stock edged up amid the news.
Claude can now connect to lifestyle apps like Spotify, Instacart and AllTrails
Anthropic is expanding its directory of connected services for its Claude AI chatbot.
Anthropic acknowledges Claude Code issues, denies 'nerfing'
Anthropic said it found three issues with Claude Code after users complained the AI tool deteriorated.
Ranked: AI Models U.S. Businesses Pay For
OpenAI has long been the leader for paid usage by U.S. businesses, but Anthropic has closed the gap with tools like Claude Code and Cowork.
Anthropic has surged to a trillion-dollar valuation on secondary markets.
Buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company's valuation on some platforms to $1 trillion.
SpaceX and Cursor: What smart people are saying about the $60B deal
Partnering with Cursor could be a crucial step for Elon Musk to get ahead of AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Elon Musk explores Mistral partnership to take on AI rivals
Musk is eyeing a collaboration with French startup Mistral to help xAI catch Anthropic and OpenAI.
Claude Mythos AI Model Uncovers 271 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in Firefox
Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, has identified a staggering 271 zero-day vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox marking a seismic shift in AI-powered cybersecurity defense. The findings, addressed in Firefox 150, represent the most significant single batch of security fixes in the browser’s history. The discovery didn’t happen in isolation. Since February 2026, Mozilla’s […]
Sam Altman: Anthropic is using 'fear' to tout Claude Mythos
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in contrast to Anthropic's recent moves, OpenAI would err on the side of giving more people access to AI models.
Mozilla says it patched 271 Firefox vulnerabilities thanks to Anthropic's Claude Mythos
Mozilla shared some details that support Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI model as a way to protect critical services.
Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 zero-day vulnerabilities in Firefox 150
CTO says new AI model is "every bit as capable" as world's best security researchers.
Mozilla Used Anthropic’s Mythos to Find and Fix 151 Bugs in Firefox
The Firefox team doesn’t think emerging AI capabilities will upend cybersecurity long term, but they warn that software developers are likely in for a rocky transition.
AI's taste test
Anthropic says Claude Opus 4.7 is more tasteful on work tasks.
Schematik Is ‘Cursor for Hardware.’ Anthropic Wants In
Schematik is a program that aims to help people vibe code for physical devices. Hopefully, it won’t blow anything up.
3 executive departures shake up OpenAI's leadership team
OpenAI loses three executives as it sharpens its business focus and faces rising pressure from Anthropic.
White House chief of staff to meet with Anthropic CEO over its new Mythos AI model
The meeting comes after tensions have run hot between the Trump administration and the safety-conscious Anthropic, which has sought to put guardrails on the development of AI to minimize any potential risks and maximize its economic and national security benefits for the U.S.
Washington’s Scramble to Get Mythos, Anthropic’s Powerful New Model
Federal agencies have requested access to Claude Mythos Preview, which Anthropic says can rapidly identify — and potentially create — new cyberthreats.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI shifts its focus to business users amid Anthropic pressure
The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also...
OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic with beefed-up Codex that gives it more power over your desktop
OpenAI's agentic coding tool has gotten a major makeover, with a variety of new powers and abilities.
OpenAI’s big Codex update is a direct shot at Anthropic’s Claude Code
Codex can now use your macOS apps on its own.
OpenAI focuses on business users amid competition with rival Anthropic
OpenAI executives say they will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for “high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI shifts its focus to business users amid Anthropic pressure
OpenAI executives say they will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for “high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI shifts its focus to business users amid Anthropic pressure
The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages.
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s New AI Model? Its Chief Science Officer Explains.
Just how fast is the future coming at us, and how worried should we be? Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, the latest in what has become the leading family of AI models. In a very short time, AI models from Anthropic and other companies have become shockingly powerful at coding. But Mythos stands out because it is not just able to write code that can hack into critical systems, like those that run financial companies, but also to analyze systems and find and string together vulnerabilities in them, allowing Mythos to evade even sophisticated defenses. Anthropic chose to release Mythos to only about 40 leading corporations, so they could analyze the model’s capabilities and prepare countermeasures, in an effort it calls Project Glasswing. The release of Mythos—and the prospect of similarly powerful AIs to follow—has caused tremors at the top levels of Washington and corporate America. Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic, is at the center of this breakthrough. We sat down with Kaplan so he could walk us through just how powerful Mythos is, what the implications are for issues like our personal privacy, and what comes next. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Fischer: For the layman, how is Claude Mythos different—more powerful, more dangerous—from previous models released by Anthropic? Jared Kaplan: I think most people have experienced the fact that our computers get faster and faster over time and over many decades. There’s this very smooth trend where every 18 months, maybe, computer processing power doubles. I think AI is on a trend in which it’s improving maybe 10 times faster than that. A lot of the earliest work that I did in AI was around identifying this scaling trend in AI. Claude Mythos is the latest model from Anthropic, but it’s not different because it’s qualitatively different. It’s really just kind of the culmination of the trend of AI models getting smarter and smarter at all kinds of general capabilities, from reasoning to software engineering to scientific research to knowledge work. For us, it was the first model to demonstrate very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities. It wasn’t because we trained Claude Mythos to focus on cybersecurity, but it was because, as a byproduct of its general intelligence and its general ability with software, it’s particularly good at identifying vulnerabilities in software and how to exploit them.
We tested Anthropic’s redesigned Claude Code desktop app and 'Routines' -- here's what enterprises should know
For the enterprise, the Desktop GUI is likely to become the standard for management and review, while the CLI remains the tool for execution.
Anthropic taps Ballard Partners amid ongoing dispute with War Department
Will the sides be able to find a ceasefire?
Anthropic draws offers from VCs to invest at up to $800 billion valuation, Business Insider reports
Anthropic has received multiple offers from venture capital firms valuing the Claude maker at as much as $800 billion in recent weeks, more than double its current valuation, Business Insider reported on Tuesday, citing sources.
VCs are flooding Anthropic with offers to invest at up to $800 billion
Anthropic has received multiple offers to invest at valuations as high as $800 billion in recent weeks, which would more than double its valuation.
Anthropic's AI Assistant Claude Is Now Available in Microsoft Word
If you're using Word, you can now try out an alternative AI tool to Copilot, though it's only in beta testing for now.
Anthropic brings Claude into Microsoft Word, and legal contract review leads its use cases
Anthropic's Claude for Word beta is live in Microsoft Word for Team and Enterprise users, with legal contract review as the tool's first listed use case
Anthropic may soon pass OpenAI on this measure of AI business spending
Anthropic has seen a surge in business spending in recent months, according to Ramp's AI index.
Anthropic's Claude for Word is a new challenge to Microsoft's empire
Anthropic launched a beta version of Claude for Word. It's another challenge to Microsoft's software empire, and a bid to appeal to lawyers.
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
Anthropic's Mythos sparks Washington's big bank anxiety
Manufacturing a disease and selling the cure is a Bond villain business plan. Is Anthropic all that different?
Anthropic closes in on OpenAI as US business use surges
Divergence reflects company’s recent rapid growth owing to strong interest in its Claude Code products
Anthropic Mythos cybersecurity concerns: What smart people are saying
Anthropic's Mythos AI model sparked cybersecurity concerns, but some think it's been overhyped. Here's what smart people re saying.
Federal judge finds Pentagon in violation of court order to restore reporters' access
A federal judge on Thursday ruled that the Defense Department is violating his earlier order to restore access to the Pentagon for reporters, a setback in the administration's efforts to impede the work of journalists.
Why Anthropic sent its Claude AI to an actual psychiatrist
Mythos is "the most psychologically settled model we have trained to date."
Appeals court decides against Anthropic in latest round of its AI battle with the Trump administration
The ruling followed another judge's order that forced President Donald Trump's administration to remove a label tainting the company as a national security risk.
US software stocks fall as Anthropic's new AI model revives disruption fears
U.S. software shares tumbled on Thursday after Anthropic held back the wide release of a powerful AI model over concerns it could expose hidden cybersecurity vulnerabilities, deepening investor fears about the threat to traditional software firms.
Workday CTO trades title for 'member of technical staff' at Anthropic
Some high-level employees are ditching their posts at large outfits to take on the blurrier title of "member of technical staff" at frontier AI labs.
Anthropic says its latest AI model is too powerful to be released
Anthropic said Claude Mythos is too good at hacking and that's why you won't be able to use it anytime soon.
WMU business college receives largest philanthropic gift in its history | Haworth College of Business
standard
AI Giant Anthropic Leans Into Life Sciences With $400M Coefficient Bio Catch
Anthropic in October last year iterated its Claude AI model to better cater to biopharma purposes. Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, AbbVie and others already use Claude in their operations.
Anthropic cuts off OpenClaw support for Claude subscriptions
Anthropic said third-party tools like OpenClaw put an "outsized strain on our systems." OpenClaw's founder said cutting support would be "a loss."
Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take on Claude Code and Codex
As Cursor launches the next generation of its product, the AI coding startup has to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic more directly than ever.