Summary

Anthropic announces a public initiative inviting people to submit their hardest questions about AI. The company frames this as part of its Public Benefit Corporation mission to secure the benefits of advanced AI while mitigating risks. Anthropic describes existing efforts — internal research, public surveys, model access for scientists, fellowship programs, and governance structures — and pledges to publicly track progress and be transparent about shortcomings as it responds to submitted questions.

Key Points

• Anthropic asks the public to submit hard questions about AI’s effects on jobs, society, families, science, medicine, safety, and governance.
• Existing work: public surveys (52,000 Americans), a global Claude-user survey (81,000 users across 159 countries and 70 languages), in-person focus groups, anonymized usage studies, and the Anthropic Interviewer.
• Research & governance: Anthropic Institute for societal challenges, Long-Term Benefit Trust for impartial oversight, investment in model safeguards and alignment research.
• Practical commitments: give models free to scientists, run a fellowship pairing early-career Claude users with nonprofits, and publicly track and report actions addressing submitted questions.
• Engineering implications: prioritize transparency, reproducible alignment experiments, robust misuse mitigations, privacy-preserving analysis of telemetry, and APIs that enable responsible scientific use.

How engineers can engage

• Review the public questions on the hard-questions site and prioritize issues aligned with safety and societal impact.
• Contribute reproducible experiments or tooling (privacy-preserving logging, auditing, interpretability) that support Anthropic’s tracking goals.
• Collaborate with researchers and nonprofits enabled by the fellowship and free model access to validate real-world benefits while monitoring risks.