Hook
Anthropic’s second RSP risk report runs 50 pages. It contains exactly zero cryptographic signatures, zero on-chain timestamps, and zero smart contract verifications. In a world where blockchain protocols are audited down to the opcode, AI safety reports remain trust-based documents. The contrast is stark. When I audited the 2x Capital leverage token smart contracts in 2017, I found three slippage calculation errors that the whitepaper had glossed over. The code was law. The whitepaper was marketing. Anthropic’s RSP report is effectively a whitepaper—a statement of intent, not a verifiable execution. That is a structural flaw that the blockchain industry recognized years ago.
Context
Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) is a self-governance framework designed to prevent catastrophic AI risks. It borrows from biosafety level (BSL) taxonomy, mapping model capabilities to ASL-1 through ASL-4. The second risk report, published around mid-2025, updates the assessments for Claude 3/3.5 in areas like CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear), cyberattack capabilities, and autonomous replication. The RSP is a procedural innovation—it institutionalizes safety thresholds for model weights, deployment restrictions, and access controls. But it is a centralized, self-reporting regime. There is no independent third-party audit, no immutable ledger of safety events, and no mechanism for the public to verify that Anthropic’s claims match its codebase.
Blockchain protocols solved this problem years ago. Smart contract audits are standard. Formal verification tools like Certora and Scribble allow developers to prove invariants. On-chain timestamps create an immutable record of when a contract was deployed and when it was updated. The RSP lacks all of this. It is a paper promise in a world that has moved to “code is law.” The irony is that Anthropic’s own models are built on software stacks that could benefit from the same trustless verification principles that underpin DeFi.
Core
Let me be precise. The RSP’s second report describes three key dimensions: capability evaluation, threshold setting, and mitigation measures. It claims that Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been assessed against ASL-3 criteria. But how do we know? The report does not link to a smart contract that records the evaluation results. It does not provide a cryptographic commitment to the test sets used. It does not offer a public verification key that allows anyone to replay the assessment. This is a regression to the pre-blockchain era of trust-by-authority.
I have seen this pattern before. In 2022, I spent three weeks dissecting the Terra/Luna collapse. The protocol’s seigniorage share distribution logic contained a race condition that only showed up under high volatility. The code was public, but the economic model was not. The whitepaper promised stability. The code delivered a bug that cost billions. The RSP is the same: a beautiful theoretical framework with no on-chain evidence of its execution. The chain remembers what the ego forgets—but the RSP report is not on any chain.
Consider the ASL-3 threshold for CBRN information diffusion. How does Anthropic measure it? Likely through expert red-teaming and benchmark tests. But those tests are not reproducible. The exact prompts, the model weights, the temperature settings—all are opaque. In blockchain, we have gas metering, opcode execution traces, and state diffs. Every step is auditable. The RSP’s evaluation methodology is a black box. This is not a pedantic point. If the RSP is to be the gold standard for AI safety, it must adopt the same verification rigor that the crypto industry demands of its own protocols.
Verification precedes trust, every single time. That is the lesson I learned from the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract verification in 2020. I spent 120 hours cross-referencing the genesis deposit contract’s security parameters against the Geth client specifications. The community was panicking about staking security. I found the cryptographic proofs were sound. That verification was possible because the code was on-chain and the specifications were public. The RSP report offers no such verifiability. It is a PDF, not a proof.
The report also fails to address the critical issue of weight control. ASL-3 requires strict access controls on model weights. But Anthropic hosts its models on AWS and Google Cloud. The actual security of the weights depends on the cloud providers’ infrastructure. There is no on-chain attestation of hardware security modules, no decentralized key management, no publicly verifiable log of access events. In blockchain, we have multisig wallets, timelocks, and governance votes. The RSP’s weight security is a trust relationship, not a trustless system.
Contrarian
Here is the counter-intuitive angle: the RSP’s focus on catastrophic risks (CBRN, cyber) is a distraction from the more mundane but pervasive risks of bias, discrimination, and privacy violations. The blockchain community makes the same mistake. We obsess over smart contract bugs and oracle manipulation, while ignoring front-end vulnerabilities and social engineering attacks. The RSP covers only the tail risks. It does not address the everyday harms that will affect millions of users. This selective coverage is strategic—it positions Anthropic as a responsible actor while avoiding the cost of mitigating lower-probability, higher-frequency issues. Truth is not consensus; it is consensus verified. The RSP is not verified by any external party.
Moreover, the RSP’s self-reporting model creates a perverse incentive. If Anthropic sets the ASL-3 threshold too high, it avoids regulatory scrutiny. If it sets it too low, it restricts its own business. Without independent auditors, the report is a marketing document with a safety veneer. The blockchain industry learned this lesson with the 2022 collapses. Self-auditing is not auditing. The RSP needs a decentralized verification layer—something like a DAO of independent AI safety researchers that can attest to the model’s capabilities using zero-knowledge proofs or differential privacy techniques.
Takeaway
The next generation of AI safety will not be written in PDFs. It will be written in Solidity, deployed on-chain, and verified by every node. Until then, trust remains a fragile consensus. Code is law, but history is the judge. Anthropic’s RSP is a step forward in governance, but without a blockchain audit trail, it is a step backward in transparency. The chain remembers what the ego forgets—and the RSP report is still a fingerprint on a piece of paper, not a hash on a ledger.