Statements by an Anthropic representative at a gathering of transatlantic far-right politicians and other figures raise questions about how the company is pursuing the ethical development of its advanced AI (artificial intelligence) systems.

Chloe Lubinski, Anthropic’s lead on “research partnerships with the world’s faith and philosophy traditions,” per the event’s list of speakers, framed attendees at the 2026 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference as uniquely positioned to provide the kind of moral oversight needed to keep powerful AI systems in check.

As DeSmog recently revealed, ARC is funded by oil and gas investors, as well as donors to President Donald Trump, who has taken a wrecking ball to America’s federal climate and clean energy science and policies, and opposes regulation of AI.

“We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we’re failing. And we need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” Lubinski said on Tuesday. “That is why you’re here. We need you to help us see what we, from inside the labs, cannot see.”

To emphasize her point, Lubinski quoted recent remarks that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah made in May, shortly after the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI, “Magnifca Humanitas.”

“[Anthrophic] operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Olah said in his Vatican City speech. “It is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives…who are willing to say hard things and insist on safety.” 

Lubinski told her ARC audience that the same principle applied to them. “[Olah] admitted that every frontier lab, including ours, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict,” she said. “And then he asked for help.”

Lubinski wasn’t the only Anthropic representative attending ARC. Liam Booth-Smith, Anthropic’s Head of Europe, Middle East, and Africa Policy, did a fireside chat at a Wednesday session on “Technology and Human Flourishing.” Booth-Smith served as chief of staff to former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who oversaw the rollback of UK climate commitments and advocated “max[xing] out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves.

Economic Advisory Council, predicted that “there will be a lot of jobs in the energy sector” in an “AI-drenched world,” but didn’t mention which energy sources he had in mind. Cowen also chided the UK for its higher energy costs, which he framed as driving away AI companies.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Other notables from the UK right on the ARC agenda include former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.

Anthropic’s willingness to seek moral guidance at a conference that some describe as the “anti-woke Davos” contrasts starkly with its reputation as a more virtuous AI corporation. The company has donated $20 million to support U.S. political candidates who support AI regulations. and refused to let the United States Department of Defense use its AI models for mass surveillance and lethal weapons systems earlier this year.

Anthropic has been silent on environmental, climate change, or green energy commitments. It has yet to publish sustainability reports, emissions reductions goals, or clean energy agreements.

But there is some evidence that climate is on the company’s radar. Anthropic is joining firms like Google, Meta, and Stripe in Frontier Climate’s $915 million buyers group of investors in the “carbon removal” space of emerging technologies to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, Heatmap reported in mid-June.

While carbon removal technologies are an important response to the climate crisis, they may be decades away from reaching commercial scale, say experts and environmental advocates. Meanwhile, slashing climate-heating carbon emissions in the present remains critical to holding temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

A 2023 DeSmog review of 12 large-scale carbon capture and removal projects — technologies that bury carbon emissions from industrial facilities — found a pattern of missed carbon capture targets, cost overruns, and billions of dollars of government subsidies drained from the pockets of taxpayers. 

Speaking Tuesday at ARC, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright urged the UK to embrace fossil fuels and “change course” on its landmark climate crisis policies, calling climate change a “slow-moving phenomenon” that would be addressed by technology.

“Always more people die in the winter than die in summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is,” said Wright, a millionaire former oil and gas industry executive, amid the deadly record-breaking heatwave currently smothering the UK and Europe.