Anthropic Veterans Eye Remote Land as a Hedge Against AI Catastrophe

The Wall Street Journal reports that several early Anthropic employees are discussing buying a remote plot of land in the US in case artificial intelligence development goes wrong. According to the report, these people are tied to the effective altruism subculture and a Bay Area network of specialists who have spent years working through catastrophic AI risk scenarios. That network includes the philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky. Back when Anthropic was just starting out, employees already discussed Manhattan Project-style scenarios: working from facilities in the desert shielded against electromagnetic interference.

I work with Claude in Claude Code every day, and in my experience agent failures come from vague tasks, not from some deeper danger. This land rumor feels more like a story about the culture of Anthropic's early employees and their ties to effective altruism than a technical signal about the models themselves. I stay calm about it, though I admit part of the team may take these scenarios seriously.