WSJ: some early Anthropic employees weigh buying remote US land as a refuge if AI goes badly wrong
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 14 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra149 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.588 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon179 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7118 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 88 days before it.
Key facts
- Claim (WSJ via AI Weekly, Sept 27): some early Anthropic employees weigh buying remote US land as a relocation plan ‘if AI goes awry’; summaries describe discussion, not completed purchases or a company programme
- Setting (secondary summaries): conversations around Constellation, the Berkeley AI-safety co-working space; options reportedly discussed included islands, iodine stockpiles and shielded bunkers. These specifics vary between summaries and are unverified
- Anthropic, per AIToolsReview’s summary: its roughly 3,500 employees hold varied views
- Context: the story ran as Anthropic prepared its IPO and while the White House criticised AI ‘doomerism’; 36Kr’s long Chinese feature (Oct 8) on the same theme adds history of EA funding for Anthropic (Sam Bankman-Fried’s early stake) and of Constellation and Lightcone
- Related EA context (Gizmodo, Aug 16, citing the FT): more than 60 current and former Anthropic employees signed the 10% giving pledge, and the seven founders pledged to give away 80% of their fortunes
What happened
The WSJ profile of Anthropic’s roots in effective altruism included the detail that some early staff have discussed buying remote land to relocate to if AI development goes catastrophically wrong. The story spread through aggregators and foreign-language press in the following two weeks.
The WSJ article is paywalled and was not read. Its exact date, byline, wording and the number of employees involved are unconfirmed; the date here comes from AI Weekly’s summary (Sept 27, 07:57 UTC).
Why it matters
It shows that some people building frontier AI plan privately for the catastrophic outcomes they warn about publicly. The story arrived as Anthropic prepared to go public and as the White House attacked “doomerism”, so it fed political arguments on both sides.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 press, 1 reaction
Press
- AI Weekly: WSJ, early Anthropic employees weigh buying remote US land as relocation plan if AI goes awry (Sept 27)aiweekly.co, press
- 36Kr (English): feature on Anthropic, effective altruism and AI-catastrophe planning (Oct 8)eu.36kr.com, press
- Gizmodo: The effective altruists reportedly have their mojo back thanks to AI (Aug 16)gizmodo.com, press
Reactions
- AIToolsReview: what the WSJ reporting on Anthropic employees and remote land says (Oct 11)aitoolsreview.co.uk, discussion
Changes
- Filed from lead (36Kr feature, 2026-10-09); written from summaries, WSJ original unread