Anthropic writes the agenda, the Bank of England books the room

The Bank of England calls the NCSC, the FCA confers with the Treasury, and the substance of all those urgent conversations comes from Anthropic. What a fortunate coincidence that the party with the most to lose also happens to have the most detailed information.

The agenda they set

Scott Bessent invites Wall Street bankers, Jerome Powell takes a seat, and the papers call it a signal of systemic importance. The signal is that the two highest financial authorities in the United States are sitting in a room listening to the people who created the problem, at a time those people chose, about an agenda those people assembled. The Federal Reserve booked the room. Anthropic made the slides. The Bank of England is preparing for conversations with banks, in two weeks’ time, while the vulnerabilities have already been found and access was granted months ago to Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. What the Bank of England will be discussing in two weeks is not the situation as it stands. It is the situation as described in a press release they received, filed, and kept neatly on record.

A PR function with an official letterhead

The people whose hospital systems, water networks and bank accounts turned out to be vulnerable were not invited, receive no briefing, and are the subject of the meeting without being in the room. Exclusion here is not a side effect; it is the architecture. Anthropic decides what is dangerous. Anthropic decides who gets access. Anthropic decides when regulators are allowed to know what has been unfolding for months, and regulators schedule urgent meetings to discuss what Anthropic has told them they should discuss, then issue a press release to demonstrate they are taking it seriously. The word for a situation in which the regulated party supplies the facts on which the regulating party bases its judgment is not “oversight.” The meetings continue, the agenda stays Anthropic’s, and the system calls itself governance.