Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

At the end of August, the AI company Anthropic announced that its chatbot Claude wouldn’t help anyone build a nuclear weapon. According to Anthropic, it had partnered with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make sure Claude wouldn’t spill nuclear secrets.

The manufacture of nuclear weapons is both a precise science and a solved problem. A lot of the information about America’s most advanced nuclear weapons is Top Secret, but the original…