Does Anthropic deserve the trust of the cybersecurity community?
Does Anthropic deserve the trust of the cybersecurity community?
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/03/12/anthropic-cybersecurity-industry-trust/
Publish Date: 2026-03-12 01:30:00
Source Domain: www.helpnetsecurity.com
The cybersecurity industry runs on trust. The belief that when a vendor says they will behave a certain way, they will, that critical CVEs are in fact critical, or when companies say they’re GDPR compliant, they really are. But earning trust is not a one-and-done thing.
Anthropic understood this better than any AI company. As OpenAI moved fast and broke things, Anthropic published a Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), a framework for addressing catastrophic risks. Although it’s a voluntary pledge, combined with its leadership’s earnest ambition to lead an industry-wide “race to the top” on safety, Anthropic quickly became the poster child for trustworthy AI.
In January 2026, the Anthropic-OpenAI rivalry spilled out into the public and things very quickly got weird.
In the lead up to the Super Bowl, Anthropic spent millions on ads mocking OpenAI for launching ads in ChatGPT. With headlines reading “Deception,” “Betrayal,” “Treachery,” and “Violation,” Anthropic brazenly claimed the moral high ground. Claude, the ads declared, would never use your most intimate conversations to serve you ads.
On February 20th, Anthropic launched Claude Code Security, spooking the cybersecurity industry and cybersecurity stocks.
Then, on February 24th, it quietly published RSP 3.0. It framed the rewrite as a maturation of the policy, and in some ways, it is. But buried in the copy is a structural shift that security professionals should not ignore.
The previous RSP committed to keeping Anthropic’s absolute risk levels below acceptable thresholds regardless of what competitors did. Version 3.0 explicitly abandons that framing. Now Anthropic’s formerly stringent safety commitments are relative. If its competitors aren’t pausing, they won’t either, as all pausing would do is hand the wheel to the least responsible driver. Understandable, but move the goal posts, and your brand moves with it. And rumors about a rift with the Pentagon were…
