Report: Some longtime Anthropic employees are purchasing remote retreats as a hedge against "AI going wrong"

Several of Anthropic's earliest employees are taking worst-case AI scenarios seriously enough to plan for them in the physical world. According to The Wall Street Journal, some of the company's longest-serving staff have spent recent weeks telling an industry colleague they are considering purchasing land in remote parts of the United States — places they could relocate to "if AI goes awry."

The detail offers a rare glimpse into how people closest to frontier AI development think about its risks, and why contingency planning has moved from dinner-table speculation to actual logistics.

From Dinner Conversations to Desert Scenarios

Fleeing AI is not a fresh idea within this group. Former employees recalled to the WSJ that even during Anthropic's early days, company dinners included talk of a Manhattan Project-style scenario: staff might be asked to move to the desert and continue building AI inside an electromagnetically shielded government facility.

Anthropic itself was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who publicly framed the company around AI safety. The new reporting suggests that safety-first culture extends into employees' personal planning, not just research priorities.

The Effective Altruism Connection

The WSJ report traces how tightly the earliest hires at both Anthropic and OpenAI are linked to the Effective Altruism (EA) subculture — a movement focused on doing the most good, which in recent years has put catastrophic AI risk near the top of its agenda.

Many of these employees came from a Bay Area network of self-described "doomers" who have spent years working through end-of-the-world scenarios. Their intellectual reference point is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who raised alarms about uncontrolled AI back in the mid-2000s and became the godfather figure of this community.

Before AI rose to the top of the threat list, the same circle was preoccupied with other existential dangers, from asteroid impacts to supervolcanoes. The shift toward AI risk followed the field's rapid progress.

Why It Matters

The contrast is striking: engineers building some of the world's most capable AI systems are the same people weighing how to live far from major population centers if those systems fail catastrophically. Whether the land purchases happen or not, the reporting underscores that AI risk, for this community, is treated as a practical planning question rather than pure science fiction.

What to watch next: whether any confirmed purchases emerge, and how Anthropic publicly addresses employee-level contingency planning as its models grow more capable.