Can Anthropic Control What It's Building?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his reporting on Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company behind the large language model Claude. They talk about Lewis-Kraus’s visits to the company’s San Francisco headquarters, what drew him to its research on interpretability and model behavior, and how its founding by former OpenAI leaders reflects deeper fissures within the A.I. industry. They also examine what “A.I. safety” looks like in theory and in practice, the range of views among rank-and-file employees about the technology’s future, and whether the company’s commitment to building safe and ethical systems can endure amid the pressures to scale and compete.
This week’s reading:
- “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- “Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?,” by David D. Kirkpatrick
- “Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show,” by Kelefa Sanneh
- “Listening to Joe Rogan,” by David Remnick
- “What Do We Want from a Protest Song?,” by Mitch Therieau
The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week.
Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, Gideon. |
| 0:07.0 | Hey, Tyler. |
| 0:08.0 | Thanks so much for being here. |
| 0:10.0 | Thank you for having me. |
| 0:11.0 | So I feel like we're at this funny point right now with AI, where we've been told for years that it was going to replace people like you and me, you know, writers, editors, people in the |
| 0:21.4 | humanities. And instead, we're seeing something where it actually looks like it's the coders who |
| 0:26.5 | are most at risk. I mean, there was this huge stock market sell-off of software stocks, and you |
| 0:33.6 | see software engineers in particular online kind of grieving about their jobs and just this feeling that like the work that they used to do that was so important is no longer that crucial anymore or can be done by AI much faster than they were able to do it. |
| 0:48.7 | And so given that you've just reported on Anthropic, an AI company that is full of people who seemingly to me |
| 0:56.1 | are kind of at risk of being replaced themselves by the tool that they're creating. What was the |
| 1:01.1 | feeling there like? I mean, how are the engineers at Anthropic thinking about this problem? |
| 1:07.2 | Yeah, I mean, this is something that came up constantly in Anthropic, starting when I first visited last spring, that they were feeling like, you know, we are really the canaries in the coal mine |
| 1:15.4 | here. And they thought, well, there are all these people who feel like we're not actually |
| 1:19.2 | paying attention to the effects that this might have on the white collar workforce when, like, |
| 1:24.8 | no, we're the first people being impacted by this. I mean, |
| 1:27.5 | I watched over the course of, you know, May when I first visited Anthropic through the fall, |
| 1:33.6 | software engineers would tell me, you know, over the past four or five months, I've watched like |
| 1:38.2 | the amount of coding that I do by hand go from 100% to 60%. And then by September, it was 20%, and now it's, you know, |
| 1:46.9 | during fact checking, one of the people said, well, now it's actually 0% that I do. |
| 1:51.0 | And there's an anthropic employee named Alex Tamkin, really wonderful, warm guy who had sent a |
| 1:57.1 | slack message to his team at 417 in the morning saying, now I have to figure out |
| 2:02.0 | what I'm supposed to be doing while Claude is doing my work. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.