What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade

Editor’s Note: A 23-member Sociotechnical Grand Challenges Coalition drawn from across social sectors, regions and political perspectives contributed to and supported this work.

Last month, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to cut off access to its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals (including its own employees). Within hours, the company disabled the systems for every customer. The episode laid bare a widening gap: The raw capability of these systems now advances at a pace far faster than the institutions built to govern, absorb or even understand them.

That gap has become a source of alarm among the people building the technology. In his June 2026 essay “ Policy on the AI Exponential,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI capabilities are climbing at an exponential rate while our policy and social institutions move at their accustomed pace, a mismatch he likens to seeking military aid from trees. The same week, the company’s research division, The Anthropic Institute, released internal data on models that have begun to help build their own successors, giving fresh weight to long-running speculation about recursive self-improvement.

We share much of this concern. But we are struck by an asymmetry in how it is being addressed. The conversation is remarkably ambitious and concrete about two tasks: building more capable systems and aligning those systems with human values. But there is little discussion about preparing society to absorb these systems. Even essays like Amodei’s present the social agenda as a list of domains that need “reimagining” and fail to examine what that reimagining would require. For every detailed roadmap to superintelligence, there is little more than a gesture toward the human and institutional infrastructure to ensure its benefits are achieved safely and broadly shared.

The imbalance manifests in the flow of capital. For every dollar spent to make AI systems more capable, a tiny fraction go…