Twitter owner Elon Musk met with civil rights leaders Tuesday — here’s what happened
Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the automobile awards “Das Goldene Lenkrad” (The golden steering wheel) given by a German newspaper in Berlin, Germany, November 12, 2019.
Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
Days after closing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk faced pressure from heads of civil rights groups to disallow many users who had been banned from the platform from returning, and to give company staffers access to the tools necessary to combat election-related misinformation.
Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Asian American Foundation and Free Press, a media reform advocacy group, spoke with Musk in an almost hour-long Zoom call on Tuesday, one week before the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, helped organize the call after speaking with Musk previously, and took part in the meeting, according to three of the attendees.
Some of the organizations represented have co-signed an open letter to Twitter’s advertisers to encourage them to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he [Musk] follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”
Bloomberg reported that some employees had been frozen out of their access to tools used for content moderation and policy enforcement, which could impact the company’s ability to eliminate misinformation on Election Day. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, defended the move as “exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk.” He said Twitter is still enforcing its rules.
After the call with civil rights groups, Musk tweeted that users who’ve been banned from Twitter for violating its rules — a group that includes former President Donald Trump — will not have the chance to return to the platform for at least another few weeks. Prior reports suggested Musk was planning to allow people who’d been kicked off Twitter for disciplinary reasons to come back.
Musk told the group that he plans to retain and enforce Twitter’s election integrity measures, and staff will have access to the necessary tools by the end of this week, Free Press CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who was on the call, said in an interview.
Michael Kives, a longtime Musk ally, was also on the call, according to the participants. Kives’ firm, K5 Global, has backed SpaceX and The Boring Company, two of Musk’s other companies.
Musk was the only Twitter representative on the call. Neither Musk nor Kives, who reportedly worked as a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, told CNBC on Wednesday that he urged Musk to implement a consistent process for letting people back onto Twitter.
Robinson said he “spoke to him [Musk] about the folks that had incited violence and the message that it sends both to just replatform them without a very clear and transparent process.” He also said that, when it allows people to return, Twitter should “take accountability, not just for what these folks do, but to the message it sends their followers.”
Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t mentioned by name on the call, attendees said. But Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, said the group told Musk, “there are some people whose offenses are so egregious that they should never be allowed back on the platform.” Johnson added, referring to Trump, that “I would hope that he’s never placed back on the platform because we’d all be in danger.”
Musk said before he finalized his purchase of Twitter that it was a “mistake” to permanently ban Trump from the platform. But after the deal was completed, Musk quickly moved to reassure advertisers that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” just because he favors more lenient content moderation policies.
Musk told advertisers he acquired Twitter because he believes it’s “important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
The Tesla CEO said he plans to create a council at Twitter that will help review its content moderation approach. He said the group “will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”
WATCH: Musk’s Twitter sees spike in racist posts and fake news
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery.
Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.
It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.
The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences.
“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”
Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.
The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.
Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.
That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.
“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies.
The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission.
Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes.
Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.
Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.
“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model
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