I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable.

Write essays about AI safety in the application.

An entire interview dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and ethics and nothing else.

Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.

In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.

This tracks with what I've seen across the industry. The safety theater exists because it's great marketing — "we're the responsible ones" is a differentiator when you're competing for enterprise contracts and talent who want to feel good about where they work.

The structural problem is that once you've taken billions in VC, safety becomes a negotiable constraint rather than a core value. The board's fiduciary duty runs toward returns, not toward whatever was in the mission statement. PBC status doesn't change that in practice — there's basically zero enforcement mechanism.

What's wild is how fast the cycle has compressed. Google took maybe 15 years to go from "don't be evil" to removing it from the code of conduct. OpenAI took about 5 years from nonprofit to capped-profit to whatever they are now. Anthropic is speedrunning it in under 3. At this rate the next AI startup will launch as a PBC and pivot before their Series B closes.