Anthropic is opening an office in DC while battling Pentagon in court

Anthropic has launched a new research initiative called Anthropic Institute and has revealed that its Public Policy team is opening its first office in Washington, DC this spring. The company has made the announcement just a couple of days after it sued the US government to challenge the supply chain risk designation it received from the Defense Department. As Axios notes, Anthropic is tripling its Public Policy team at a time when AI companies are establishing a presence in Washington, so that they can influence future policies around artificial intelligence. In Anthropic’s case, it might have to find a way to be re-accepted by the US government first after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology.

Sarah Heck, who joined the company as Head of External Affairs, will take over from co-founder Jack Clark as Head of Policy. Meanwhile, Clark has taken the role as Head of Public Benefit and will lead the Anthropic Institute. The company explains that the institute’s role is to “tell the world” what it learns about the challenges that arise as AI firms develop more advanced AI systems. Examples include how powerful AI technologies will reshape jobs and economies and what kinds of threats they’ll magnify or introduce.

The institute will bring together and expand Anthropic’s current research teams: The Frontier Red Team that stress-tests AI systems, the Societal Impacts team that looks at how AI is used in the real world, and the Economic Research team that tracks AI’s impact on jobs and the larger economy. Anthropic has hired Matt Botvinick, a former Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind, and Zoë Hitzig, who studied AI’s social and economic impacts at OpenAI, to be founding members of the Institute.