Anthropic threw its support behind the first wave of frontier AI safety laws in the United States last year, securing new transparency requirements in California and New York that much of Silicon Valley fought against, arguing they would stifle the AI boom. But Anthropic says those laws may already be outdated, and the company is now pushing states to adopt even tougher regulations.
“The transparency-focused safety bills of 2025 were a really important start, but as the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance quickly—the policy responses need to match,” Cesar Fernandez, Anthropic’s head of US state and local government relations, told WIRED in an interview. “We think that transparency and self reporting are no longer sufficient safety measures for the most powerful AI systems.”
Being so pro-regulation is an odd message to come from a startup that is now valued at nearly $1 trillion. But Anthropic is an odd company. As we’ve written before, Anthropic’s leaders believe it needs to build a massive business based on developing and selling access to advanced artificial intelligence to fulfill its founding mission: “to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.”
As Anthropic has grown, it’s started endorsing some of the nation’s harshest proposed regulations on frontier AI companies. Many of these rules are designed to mitigate catastrophic AI risks, including the possibility that advanced models could contribute to financial disasters or mass deaths.
Beyond the self-reporting laws in California and New York, Anthropic has also supported an Illinois measure requiring AI labs to get their safety processes evaluated by third-party auditors. Most recently, the company endorsed a Massachusetts policy that would also require third-party auditing for AI labs—and empower the state’s attorney general to seek injunctive relief from companies that don’t comply.
I sat down with Fernandez this week to understand where the company’s AI policies are heading. Fernandez joined Anthropic earlier this year, after previously serving as head of US state government relations for the sports betting giant FanDuel and as a senior public policy associate at Uber. He helped both companies win policy battles in states around the country. His expertise will likely prove valuable to Anthropic, as Congress continues to stall on passing AI regulation and states are taking the lead.
“Dubious” Motives
While Anthropic’s pro-regulation agenda has been praised by AI safety groups, labor unions, and other allies of the company, some Silicon Valley leaders interpret its political efforts through a more nefarious lens.
David Sacks, the former White House AI czar and current technology adviser to President Donald Trump, has claimed that Anthropic is essentially trying to get cumbersome laws passed to trap smaller AI startups in red tape, thus securing its own position as a leader in the AI race.
“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks wrote in a social media post last year. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”
Fernandez outrightly denies the accusation, noting that Anthropic has only supported state AI bills that apply to “large AI model developers,” a term defined differently in every bill, but that generally refers to companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development and have more than $500 million in annual revenue. “It’s hard to imagine a startup meeting that threshold,” Fernandez says.
But in a world where billions of dollars in capital is now required to develop a competitive frontier AI model, there’s arguably a handful of promising startups that could meet those thresholds soon enough. To name a few, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, and Mistral have each raised billions of dollars from investors, though their revenue remains far lower than the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI. Of course, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill startups, but they are potential competitors of Anthropic.
