Anthropic is growing like wildfire. The company is still sorting out what that means.

On Thursday, the AI giant released the four primary areas of focus for The Anthropic Institute, a research effort it introduced in March to tackle some of the most pressing societal challenges that AI could present. These four areas each span several different ways that frontier models can impact security, the economy, and society broadly.

In the announcement, Anthropic said that its own “internal economy” has started to shift, new threats have emerged from the systems that it’s building and it’s seeing early signs that AI is helping speed up its own research and development. “In order to realize the full benefits of AI progress, we want to share as much of that information as we can.”

The research agenda includes:

• Economic diffusion: This branch will study how powerful AI systems could alter our economy, including who adopts it, how it’s impacting productivity, and of course the question of its impact on the job market and the shifting role of paid labor.
• Threats and resilience: This area takes a wide view of the word “threat,” studying the double-edged sword of AI in things like health and education, its impact on geopolitics, its use in surveillance, and the “offense-defense balance” of its deployment in cybersecurity and bioweapons.
• AI systems in the wild: This branch will study how society interacts with this technology, aiming to decipher how AI is impacting critical thinking skills, behavior, values and beliefs. This also takes aim at where AI agents fit into existing laws, governmental frameworks and systems of accountability.
• AI-driven R&D: This field aims to study the impact of AI being used to carry out research and innovation, examining the impact of automating the research process with less human oversight. This includes how AI R&D is governed, controlling the acceleration of AI, and what happens when these models start to build themselves.

This set of research priorities comes as Anthropic’s popularity completely explodes. At the company’s developer day event on Wednesday, CEO Dario Amodei told press that the company had planned to grow around ten times bigger this year, but could now see a growth rate of as much as 80 times. The company’s breakneck growth has led it to partner with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity available at its Colossus 1 data center — a deal that will be null and void if Anthropic’s AI engages in “actions that harm humanity,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an X post on Wednesday.

Amodei told reporters that this rate of growth is “too hard to handle,” and he’s “hoping for some more normal numbers.” Though the company’s growth is undeniable, it should be noted that reported revenue numbers aren’t always accurate when considering cloud partnerships with hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Microsoft, a figure which Anthropic reportedly may overcount, according to The Information.

Our Deeper View

Taking all of this into consideration, Anthropic walks on a tightrope right now. The company has long staked its reputation on putting safety, ethics and responsibility first. Still, AI’s risks broadly have already started to bubble up, from the security vulnerabilities of vibe-coded apps and websites to the potential for mental health crisis and cognitive atrophy at play when over-relying on this technology. The question remains: Even as the company studies the risks of these models on humanity, due to the meteoric rise of this technology, could those risks present themselves faster than our ability to combat them?