This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here . After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out the company’s unique view of the technology it is building and the ways it believes it will change the world. But Anthropic has been honing its storytelling skills for years. In fact, its public messaging is a master class in narrative capture. Earlier this month, Jack Clark, the company’s cofounder and head of policy, gave a speech at the IMF meeting in Bangkok in which he announced to the assembled economists, bankers, and lawmakers that the singularity is already here. Introduced by the science fiction writer and futurist Vernor Vinge around 40 years ago (and long debated on the nerdier fringes of the internet), the singularity is supposed to be the point at which technology gets so good that it outstrips the abilities of its makers. Humans are left in the dust, the idea goes, no longer able to compete with—or even understand—the fruits of their former creation. And this fictional world that many of us have imagined since we were kids? Apparently we’re already living in it: “I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun,” Clark told his audience. The company tells a vivid (and in many ways scary) story about a future it portrays as inevitable but one that has not yet happened, often co-opted from well-worn science fiction memes. It presents its technology as mysterious and dangerous, and insists that it is the only company trustworthy enough to tame it. (What investor wouldn’t want in on that?) Take another example. Last year, Chris Olah, another Anthropic cofounder, was invited to address the Vatican, where he told Pope Leo XIV and other religious scholars and officials what his company was learning about its technology. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.” Never mind that many researchers would scoff at such an overt suggestion that Anthropic’s software has humanlike inner experience. When so little seems certain, what Anthropic (and its fellow frontier AI companies) say is snatched up and clung to like pieces of a sinking ship. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong about any of this. (That’s for another day.) But in a world where nobody knows what’s coming, companies like Anthropic get to fill the vacuum. It’s worth taking a moment to ask: What is Anthropic?…