the more haphazard, the more true

“Dubious” Motives

While Anthropic’s pro-regulation agenda has been praised by AI safety groups, labor unions, and other allies of the company, some Silicon Valley leaders interpret its political efforts through a more nefarious lens.

David Sacks, the former White House AI czar and current technology adviser to President Donald Trump, has claimed that Anthropic is essentially trying to get cumbersome laws passed to trap smaller AI startups in red tape, thus securing its own position as a leader in the AI race.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks wrote in a social media post last year. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”

Fernandez outrightly denies the accusation, noting that Anthropic has only supported state AI bills that apply to “large AI model developers,” a term defined differently in every bill, but that generally refers to companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development and have more than $500 million in annual revenue. “It’s hard to imagine a startup meeting that threshold,” Fernandez says.

But in a world where billions of dollars in capital is now required to develop a competitive frontier AI model, there’s arguably a handful of promising startups that could meet those thresholds soon enough. To name a few, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, and Mistral have each raised billions of dollars from investors, though their revenue remains far lower than the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI. Of course, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill startups, but they are potential competitors of Anthropic.

I think the more defensible version of Fernandez’ argument is that any company large enough to develop a powerful AI model should be subject to the same regulations, because the underlying risks of the technology are the same. Fernandez notes that part of Anthropic’s goal is to “inspire a race to the top developing the most safe and secure AI systems,” which the company thinks encompasses pushing for government legislation.

“Our mission is to make sure that this transition to a world with advanced AI goes well for Americans and humanity,” says Fernandez. “If you're an AI model developer that's developing powerful AI systems, there are requirements to be transparent with people on what you're building, the model capabilities, and the risks associated with that model to critical infrastructure in states—all of that should be top priority.”

Where Anthropic Draws the Line

There are limits, however, to what Anthropic thinks states should do in the absence of federal regulation. In a policy document Anthropic published last month, the company recommends that governments should have a mechanism to block companies from deploying new AI models if it deems them unsafe. The suggestion is a bit ironic, given that the Trump administration recently told Anthropic to suspend access to its two most powerful AI models for foreign nationals, and the company wasn’t too big a fan of the move.

Anthropic thinks the right to block unsafe AI model deployments should be reserved for the federal government, and not state lawmakers—though Fernandez notes it’s an evolving conversation. After the Trump administration sent an export control directive to Anthropic that led it to take its Mythos and Fable 5 models offline for everyone, the company wrote in a blog post that blocking AI model deployments should only happen through a fair, transparent evaluation process.

Fernandez wouldn’t say much about Anthropic’s federal policy work, as it’s not his purview, but the company has been busy in that arena, too. Last month, it sent a letter to the US government accusing the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of a distillation attack—essentially extracting information from Anthropic’s models through systematic prompting to develop its own AI tools. Some AI researchers have dismissed the claims as regulatory capture by another means. They argue that Anthropic’s real goal is to persuade the US government to ban open-weight Chinese models, which could prompt thousands of American businesses that rely on them to turn to Anthropic’s enterprise offerings instead. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, notably, has warned Congress about the dangers of open source AI in the past.

At the state level, Fernandez says that Anthropic hasn’t specifically targeted open source AI models in any of the legislation it’s endorsed. “It’s less of a question of the model construction and more of the model capabilities, and when they rise to a certain level, they should be captured in these state frameworks,” he explains.

Whether or not you believe Anthropic’s efforts are sincere, the company is still playing a powerful role in shaping the future of AI policy. Its latest model releases brought the cybersecurity capabilities of advanced AI into the national spotlight. Before that, the company had already spent years warning lawmakers across the country about the catastrophic risks of advanced AI.

The concerns about AI raised more often by American voters, such as potentially losing their jobs to the technology, the negative impacts of data centers arriving in their communities, and the effects of chatbots on children, have not inspired a comparable legislative campaign from frontier AI labs. Anthropic and several of its rivals have promised that ordinary taxpayers won’t be stuck paying for data centers, and Anthropic has published proposals for responding to future AI-driven job displacement. But the industry has put considerably less political muscle behind state laws addressing those problems.

Asked about that discrepancy, Fernandez says that Anthropic is “eager to engage with lawmakers” on issues beyond catastrophic AI safety risks, and is already “having those conversations throughout the states.”

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.