There are clearly powerful actors with personal reasons to damage Anthropic’s reputation.
The Pentagon labeled them a “supply chain risk” after they declined DoD use for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. A federal judge blocked the designation. Google signed with the same office weeks later. David Sacks called them “woke” from the White House AI desk after they backed California’s safety bill. Musk has been calling them “misanthropic and evil” since the February funding round. PRC state media has been amplifying the Pentagon story, and the Atlantic Council documented the framing in March.
The PocketOS story this week is a clean example of how this lands in coverage. The actual story is that a SaaS founder left a root-scoped Railway API token in an unrelated file, and Railway’s CLI didn’t do delayed deletes on the endpoint that got called. Tom’s Hardware ran it as “Claude goes rogue”. The wires copied the headline. By Yahoo and Euronews, the token, the CLI behavior, and Cursor’s role had been compressed into a sentence.
So: do you think the aggregate effect of these actors is exaggerating the bad press against Anthropic? Or do you think it’s mostly fair critique?