David Sacks Says Anthropic Wants the Government to Save Us From Itself

One day before Anthropic published its 10,000-word warning that artificial intelligence could soon build its own successors without human oversight, the company confidentially filed for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. The paper, titled “When AI builds itself,” dropped June 4. The IPO application went in June 3.

Trump’s former White House AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, posted a response on X without naming Anthropic. “Signs you might be trying to get your frontier AI lab nationalized,” he wrote, then listed the contradictions: comparing the technology to nuclear weapons, threatening half of white-collar jobs, warning that recursive self-improvement could end humanity, all while racing ahead. “In other words, you want the government to save us from… you.”

The Three Futures

“When AI builds itself” was authored by Marina Favaro, who leads the Anthropic Institute, and Jack Clark, an Anthropic cofounder. The paper opens by noting that for most of AI’s history, humans drove every step of the development cycle, and that this has changed. “We are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves,” Favaro and Clark write, “which is speeding up our work.” The technical threshold the paper builds toward is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the point at which an AI system can fully and autonomously design a more capable successor, removing humans from the core development loop.

Favaro and Clark map out three possible futures. Current AI trends could stall before reaching RSI, in which case today’s capabilities already suffice to significantly reshape labor markets. Further along, the Anthropic Institute paper envisions AI automating most research and development while humans retain strategic direction; a 100-person team in that scenario could, by its estimate, match the research output of a 100,000-person organization. The furthest scenario is full RSI, where AI systems begin designing their own successors with minimal human involvement. For that last path, Anthropic says it doesn’t have “good intuitions” about what happens.

The paper is careful to say RSI has not happened and is not inevitable. What it argues is that the pace of current AI capability growth could bring the threshold before governance institutions are prepared to respond. “The window to investigate the questions together is here,” the paper says, calling for people outside AI companies to be part of the deliberation. The authors also note that even a recursively self-improving system cannot compress time fully: drug trial data still takes decades to accumulate, constitutions set election schedules, and human trust doesn’t form on demand.

What Claude Does to Its Own Codebase

80% and Rising

Anthropic published internal production data alongside the pause proposal. When Claude Code launched in February 2025, the model contributed a small fraction of the company’s production codebase. By May 2026 that fraction had inverted, and open-ended software engineering benchmarks, those covering tasks without predefined solutions, have risen faster in the six months through May than in the prior two years combined.

• 80% of Anthropic’s production code authored by Claude as of May 2026, up from low single digits in February 2025
• 8x more code shipped per quarter by Anthropic engineers compared to the 2021-2025 average
• 76% success rate on open-ended software engineering tasks in May 2026, up from 25% in September 2025
• 10,000+ high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities found by Project Glasswing in its first month

Project Glasswing’s First Month

Project Glasswing is a defensive cybersecurity initiative Anthropic launched in April 2026 using Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased frontier model capable of autonomously identifying software vulnerabilities and generating exploits for them. Approximately 50 partner organizations received early access, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, and Microsoft. Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits to the initiative.

In the project’s first month, scanning more than 1,000 open-source projects alone surfaced 6,202 high or critical severity flaws, per Anthropic’s Project Glasswing update published May 26. Of the vulnerability candidates independently reviewed by six security research firms, 90.6% proved valid true positives. Cloudflare identified 2,000 bugs, 400 of them high or critical. Mozilla fixed 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox, roughly ten times the yield from an earlier Claude version.

Mythos Preview is unreleased. Those findings came before the model has been deployed publicly.

A Global Pause, With Caveats

Favaro and Clark describe the proposal as a coordinated option the world should preserve. The mechanism they outline requires multiple frontier labs across multiple countries to agree simultaneously under verifiable conditions. A unilateral pause by a single lab would, per the paper, only change who leads the field without creating the deliberative process they are calling for.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.

Favaro and Clark wrote this in the June 4 paper, adding that a credible pause would need verification systems to confirm that participating labs have actually stopped and that state actors cannot advance secretly under the cover of a nominally cooperative slowdown. Training runs would need to be visible to international monitors across different legal and political systems. That is currently an unsolved problem.

Anthropic cites the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty as a historical model while acknowledging the analogy has limits. Nuclear verification took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. Comparable AI verification would require technically and diplomatically harder arrangements, and the paper acknowledges that “we don’t have that long” to construct them the slow way. The Anthropic Institute says it will convene policymakers, researchers, and other AI labs in the coming months and publish what comes out of those conversations.

Regulatory Capture or Genuine Alarm?

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, warned in a 2025 Axios interview that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and drive youth unemployment to 10-20%, a disruption he described as arriving “almost overnight” as companies quietly stop hiring. In separate remarks, he cited engineers and engineering leads inside Anthropic who have told him they no longer write code themselves, leaving that to Claude and editing the output. The June 4 paper extends those warnings to a different category of risk: whether humans will maintain meaningful oversight of how AI develops at all.

Several voices in the industry and academia have responded to the combination of warnings and fundraising with arguments that parallel Sacks’s charge:

• Kylan Gibbs, CEO of Inword AI and a former Google DeepMind researcher, argues that whoever tells governments AI is dangerous becomes the first call when officials draft regulation, positioning incumbents to shape export controls, limit open-source rivals, and design safety certification requirements that only well-capitalized labs can satisfy.
• Gary Marcus, an AI commentator and author, called the pause proposal “an incredible, cost-free piece of rhetoric, perfectly timed for the IPO,” arguing that Anthropic is unlikely to ever actually want a pause and will instead point to China as justification for continuing.
• Andrew Hall, an advisor to Forum AI and formerly to Meta Platforms, noted that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has also expressed support for a global pause, provided all frontier labs comply simultaneously, precisely the condition Anthropic’s paper sets as its own requirement for any pause to be meaningful.

The mechanism Gibbs describes is that whoever frames the danger writes the first draft of the solution. That dynamic can translate into oversight frameworks designed by the incumbents they would govern. Anthropic has not publicly addressed the nationalization charge.

The $965 Billion Problem

Anthropic’s valuation sprint since early 2025 has tracked the same upward curve as the capability data the paper describes.

By the time the paper published, Anthropic carried over $30 billion in annualized revenue and more than 1,000 enterprise customers spending at least $1 million a year on Claude products. Compute agreements signed in 2026 locked in the infrastructure behind those figures: Amazon pledged up to $25 billion and Google committed up to $40 billion, both structured around training and deploying more capable Claude models.

The February 2026 fundraise at $380 billion was described at the time as the second-largest private funding round in history. Investors at each stage priced in continued acceleration; a credible pause would require Anthropic to tell those investors that the thing they priced is, at least temporarily, off the table.

The $965 billion implied valuation would, at listing, surpass OpenAI, which closed a $122 billion round in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are in discussions to lead the Anthropic offering. The company has said the number of shares and the listing price have not been set. A public debut is targeted for as early as fall 2026.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Anthropic has not yet disclosed its IPO terms, and valuations cited reflect pre-IPO market reporting. Readers considering any investment decision should consult a qualified financial professional. Figures reflect information available as of publication on June 8, 2026.