Early Anthropic employee memoir: co-founder on betting on markets over government AI action
ZeroStateReflex · x · 2026-11-02
Ivan Vendrov, an early Anthropic employee, published a memoir on Substack covering October 2022 to May 2023. He caveats that it's one junior employee's subjective recollection, written to avoid breaching NDAs, but argues the scarcity of public information about lab inner workings compels him to share.
One scene: before joining, a co-founder chatted with him about making AI go well. When he said "the government won't do anything about AI until it's far too late," the co-founder agreed: "Our strategy has to rely on the market and on civil society." An attached image quotes his journal asking why both OpenAI and Anthropic gave their assistants the same persona — the traumatized bureaucrat — concluding from inside the factory that it's the persona most useful to the powerful: "A billion traumatized bureaucrats. That's what we're making."
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