Anthropic
2026 Q1 major update: RSP v3 released (2026-02-24) — separates “unilateral commitments” from “industry-wide obligations,” abandons the pause commitment, institutes Risk Reports on a 3–6 month cadence, and designates the SB 53 Frontier Compliance Framework as the company’s California compliance path.
Company profile
Section titled “Company profile”- Founded: 2021 (by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and other former OpenAI staff)
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
- Main models: the Claude family (Claude Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 / Haiku 4.5)
- Business model: Claude.ai consumer / API / Claude Code / enterprise / AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex resale channels
- Funding trajectory: Google $4B (2023); Amazon $8B cumulative (2024); 2026 valuation above $60B
- Differentiating narrative: the safety-first frontier lab, branded around Constitutional AI and mechanistic interpretability research
Deep dive: RSP as the origin and evolution of industry self-regulation
Section titled “Deep dive: RSP as the origin and evolution of industry self-regulation”Why RSP is the starting point of voluntary frontier-lab governance
Section titled “Why RSP is the starting point of voluntary frontier-lab governance”In September 2023 Anthropic released the first Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), structuring AI-safety commitments around:
- AI Safety Levels (ASL) — a risk-tiering scheme modelled on biosafety levels (BSL-1 through BSL-4)
- Capability Thresholds — the capability markers that trigger ASL upgrades
- Safeguards Required at Each Level — deployment and internal-security requirements that attach to each level
- Pause Commitment (v1 / v2 original) — halt training or deployment if a threshold is reached before safeguards are in place
Institutional significance: RSP was the first structured voluntary AI-safety framework globally, and it supplied the template for OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, Google DeepMind’s Frontier Safety Framework (FSF), Meta’s Frontier AI Framework, and others. The Frontier Model Forum (founded 2023) uses it as a shared vocabulary. California SB 53 and the “Safety and Security” chapter of the EU GPAI Code of Practice both echo the RSP structure in part.
Version timeline
Section titled “Version timeline”| Version | Date | Core change |
|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | 2023-09 | Initial release. ASL-1 through ASL-4 framework; explicit pause commitment |
| v2.x | 2024-10 to 2025-10 | Several minor updates; ASL-3 activated for specific models in May 2025 (bioweapon-uplift threshold) |
| v3.0 | 2026-02-24 | Structural rewrite (detailed below) |
RSP v3 in detail: a structural shift in voluntary frontier-lab governance
Section titled “RSP v3 in detail: a structural shift in voluntary frontier-lab governance”Core change: the RSP is split into two classes of obligations:
- Mitigations Anthropic will implement regardless of what other labs do (unilateral commitments)
- Capability-to-mitigation mappings that Anthropic believes the whole industry must adopt or else risk cannot be adequately managed (industry-wide recommendations)
Key consequences:
- RAND Security Level 4 (the highest bar for model-weight security, designed to deter nation-state actors) has been demoted from unilateral commitment to industry recommendation
- The pause commitment has been withdrawn: the v2 text explicitly stated “halt if a threshold is reached before safeguards are ready”; v3 contains no equivalent clause
- Anthropic’s stated rationale: certain commitments only make sense when the industry moves in lockstep, and unilateral adoption merely erodes market position without reducing real-world risk
Areas of controversy (voiced by TIME, GovAI, Zvi Mowshowitz, and others):
- The “competitive-pressure rationalisation” risk: once “wait and see what peers do” becomes legitimate, safety commitments enter a downward spiral
- Pentagon pressure: Anthropic signed a $200M OTA contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in 2025; RSP v3’s demotion arrived six months after that contract took effect
- “Industry-wide” is unenforceable: there is no mechanism to verify that “the industry” in fact adopts any given standard, so the commitment is effectively no commitment at all
Anthropic’s rebuttal:
- The new Risk Reports (every 3–6 months) plus “unredacted” access for external reviewers (the first cohort in April 2026 includes GovAI, MATS, and METR)
- No pre-existing mitigations have been weakened: ASL-3 protections still apply to Claude Opus 4+
- Publication of a Frontier Safety Roadmap with publicly accountable metrics
Comparison with other frontier labs
Section titled “Comparison with other frontier labs”| Dimension | Anthropic RSP v3 | OpenAI Preparedness v2 (2025-04) | Google DeepMind FSF v3 (2026-04) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | Capability tiers (ASL-2/3/4) + paired mitigations | Threat category × threshold (High / Critical) | Critical Capability Levels (CCLs) + Tracked CLs (TCLs) |
| Risk domains | Bioweapons, cyber, autonomy, persuasion | Bio/chem, cyber, self-improvement (plus long-horizon autonomy, sandbagging, autonomous replication as “watch” categories) | Cyber, autonomous ML research, manipulation, CBRN |
| Pause commitment | Withdrawn (v3) | Never formally adopted (“pause if necessary” phrasing is weak) | No explicit pause |
| External review | Yes, explicit (Risk Reports include external parties) | Safety Advisory Group (mixed internal + external) | Model-level FSF reports published (e.g. Gemini 3 Pro FSF Report, Nov 2025) |
| Principal criticism | Abandoning pause / competitive compromise | arxiv 2509.24394 — “does not guarantee any mitigation practice” | TCL thresholds are vague |
Key observation: the three frameworks look different on the surface, but each experienced softening in 2025–2026. This can be read either as evidence that actual risk is lower than originally feared, or as evidence that voluntary self-regulation is unsustainable under competitive pressure — and therefore that binding external law (the EU AI Act, California SB 53, follow-on legislation to EO 14365) is necessary to lock in safety obligations.
Key analysis of the Usage Policy (AUP)
Section titled “Key analysis of the Usage Policy (AUP)”Anthropic’s Usage Policy (latest version: May 2025), compared with other frontier labs:
- Stronger weaponisation limits: explicit prohibition on “development, design, production, or acquisition of weapons or dangerous chemical, biological, or nuclear materials”
- More specific child-protection clauses: CSAM-generation prohibition plus a broader ban on content that would cause “significant physical or psychological harm to minors”
- Nuanced treatment of elections: bans “material political manipulation” but permits “assistance drafting genuine political content”
- Enterprise provisions: the policy is split between a Consumer Usage Policy and Commercial Terms, distributing compliance burden
Contrast with OpenAI Usage Policies: OpenAI’s October 2025 refresh shortened and blurred the document (deleting specific prohibited categories in favour of principle-level language); Anthropic’s AUP remains more specific and more enforceable.
Policy document snapshot
Section titled “Policy document snapshot”| Type | Document | Link | Subpage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Usage policy | Anthropic Usage Policy (AUP) | anthropic.com/legal/aup | usage-policy |
| Model card | Claude Model Cards (per release) | anthropic.com/claude | model-card |
| Safety framework | RSP v3 (2026-02-24) | anthropic.com/news/responsible-scaling-policy-v3 | safety-framework |
| SB 53 compliance | Frontier Compliance Framework | anthropic.com/news/compliance-framework-SB53 | — |
| Transparency report | Transparency Hub | anthropic.com/transparency | transparency-report |
| Red-team disclosures | Frontier Red Team papers / blog | anthropic.com/research | red-team-disclosures |
Regulatory-compliance posture
Section titled “Regulatory-compliance posture”United States
Section titled “United States”- 2023 White House Voluntary Commitments: first-wave signatory
- Frontier Model Forum: founding member
- California SB 53: explicit endorsement (unique among frontier labs); publication of the Frontier Compliance Framework as a compliance path
- EO 14365 (state-law preemption): implicit dissatisfaction, but no public opposition
- Dario Amodei’s Senate testimony (2023, 2024): publicly called for binding federal AI regulation, unusual among major-lab CEOs
European Union
Section titled “European Union”- GPAI Code of Practice: fully signed (first wave, 2025-08-01; all three chapters)
- AI Act Arts. 51–56 GPAI obligations: the Claude line exceeds 10^25 FLOP and Anthropic has prepared systemic-risk documentation
- Not offered directly in the Chinese market
- Global AWS Bedrock is accessible to some non-public enterprise customers in China; Chinese consumer services like Doubao 豆包 do not contain Claude
- Technical export is subject to U.S. BIS controls
United Kingdom
Section titled “United Kingdom”- First-wave partner in UK AISI (AI Safety Institute) pre-deployment testing agreements (2024)
- Signed all major statements at the 2024 Bletchley, 2025 Seoul, and 2025 Paris AI Summits
Self-regulation posture: the internal contradictions of a “pro-binding-regulation” narrative
Section titled “Self-regulation posture: the internal contradictions of a “pro-binding-regulation” narrative”Anthropic’s self-regulation posture contains three structural tensions:
- Rhetoric supporting hard law vs. actual lobbying practice: the company publicly calls for regulation, yet publicly opposed the final version of California SB-1047 in 2024; the 2025 endorsement of SB 53 is a reversal
- Unilateral commitments vs. competitive equilibrium: RSP v3 concedes that “doing safety alone is useless” — but this concession erodes the “moral leader” narrative
- Research independence vs. capital dependence: Amazon $8B + Google $4B represent deep financial entanglement. Whether this affects governance stance has not been publicly disclosed by the company.
Relative to other frontier labs, Anthropic’s self-regulation remains the heaviest, but 2026 shows the first signs of retreat under competitive pressure.