Shirin Ghaffary on Anthropic's safety culture, Meta's Scale AI deal, and the new CEO pick

Summary

Shirin Ghaffary of Bloomberg reported on three developments in AI: Anthropic's safety practices, Meta's acquisition of Scale AI, and OpenAI's Stargate project in Abilene.

Anthropic

Dario Amodei has balanced commercial growth with research credibility. He cut major enterprise deals and doubled, then reportedly tripled, revenue. Amodei partnered with both Google and Amazon to avoid dependence on any single hyperscaler. When asked about Stargate, Amodei dismissed the scale of the project, saying Anthropic can grow without major capital deployment announcements.

AnthropMc delayed its most recent flagship release by nearly a week after a red-team flagged concerns about unexpected capability levels. The specific worry was bioweapons synthesis—whether the model could help create a novel biological agent. Anthropic uses a tiered safety framework modeled on biosafety lab protocols, escalating safeguards as models cross capability thresholds.

One fair criticism of safety delays is that a safety team with no track record of stopping releases occupies a precarious position, and claims of needing more testing can mask products that simply aren't ready. Ghaffary found no evidence that dynamic applied to Anthropic's delay. Amodei told her the hold was technical—a pre-training scaling slowdown affecting most frontier labs, not a safety gate.

Meta and Scale AI

Meta is acquiring roughly 49% of Scale AI at a valuation of $14–15 billion, marking Meta's largest-ever investment in an outside company. Bloomberg reported the deal on a Saturday night, with official details still pending as the transaction closes.

Alex Wang is joining Meta, where Zuckerberg sees him as a vehicle for renewed AI focus following criticism of the Llama 4 release. Scale's new CEO is Jason Droege, promoted internally from his previous role as VP at Uber and partner at Benchmark.

Scale faces a competitive risk. Rivals are telling other hyperscalers to reconsider doing business with a company now effectively owned by Meta. Whether Scale retains those customers as Meta ownership deepens is unclear.

Meta took a 49% stake rather than full ownership, likely for regulatory caution and operational reasons. Managing tens of thousands of offshore data-labeling contractors is not an asset Meta would naturally want to own directly. The FTC's posture on deals of this size remains genuinely unclear. A Republican-controlled commission still reviews large transactions, and Ghaffary says it is too early to predict how aggressive the agency will be.

Abilene

A Bloomberg colleague visited the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. The scale is striking in person and unambiguously real. Skepticism about whether the project was genuine becomes harder to sustain after seeing it under construction. SoftBank is financing the project step by step, with Masayoshi Son telling Bloomberg the company moves "step by step." At least 10 more US sites are planned, though locations and financing remain unconfirmed. Abilene will test whether the broader buildout can execute at the pace OpenAI and its partners promised.