Anthropic hired a global affairs chief. His job is to make friends with the Trump administration. The same administration that blacklisted the company this year.
Nothing says cutting-edge artificial intelligence like hiring a guy whose entire role is explaining to Republicans why the robot should be allowed to exist. Cuéllar gets to spend his days crafting talking points about why banning your own product is actually bad for business. Groundbreaking stuff.
Trump slapped controls on Anthropic's AI. Now Anthropic responds by creating a executive position dedicated to finding common ground. That's the corporate equivalent of getting punched in the mouth and hiring a VP of Maybe We Deserved It.
The company built language models that can write code and analyze data. But apparently they never built one that could predict getting blacklisted by a Republican administration would require a full-time diplomat. You'd think the AI could have seen that coming.
Cuéllar's resume now includes one bullet point: convince people who hate us to stop hating us. Meanwhile your average retail trader is still trying to figure out if AI stocks go up when the robots get smarter or when the government stops threatening to kill them. Trick question. Neither matters.
The funniest part is pretending this changes anything. Anthropic makes chatbots. Trump's team doesn't like the chatbots. So now there's a guy whose job is to have meetings about the chatbots. Revolutionary.
Somewhere a venture capitalist is nodding along thinking this proves AI companies are finally getting serious about regulatory strategy. That same VC will be shocked when it turns out hiring one guy to apologize doesn't actually fix being on a blacklist.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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