In “MALE ANT PULLS OFF OWN WING TO MATE WITH QUEEN,” three minutes of raw carnality from the BBC Earth’s YouTube channel, a fat, ponderous male driver ant unsheathes spikes in his abdomen to lop off his right wing, and then lets dozens of much smaller female ants squeeze him into the queen’s muddy bedchamber. It’s possible that some of San Francisco’s famously overworked and undersexed AI researchers have studied this footage for tutelage. That is where comparisons between ants and artificial intelligence would seem to begin and end. But then there is Anthropic.
Last week, the company submitted a financial prospectus for what may be the largest initial public offering ever, and announced it would list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Anthropic employees also call each other Ants — “a nickname that captures the collaborative, ego-light culture of the team,” it notes in its government filing.
ANT is marching onto a busy little hill of creepy-crawly capitalism. It’s at least the sixth insect-themed ticker in stock market history, joining a squishy cohort that includes FLY, BEE, BUG, HIVE, and GRUB — each of which have fared far better in the wild than on Wall Street. In 2014, The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched The Ant Group, a giant fin-tech player. “Small is beautiful, small is powerful,” Ant Group founder Jack Ma said of the name.
Are there risks in associating a company built on code with a bug? We’ve heard from the economists. What about the entomologists?
“It’s not very affirming,” says Deborah Gordon, an ecologist in Stanford’s biology department who has studied ant behavior for more than 40 years. Her book “Ants at Work” begins, “The basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management.” Calling employees Ants “is not only saying there’s no central control, but also that they don’t even know what they’re doing,” she said on a video call, while a large printed photo of a carpenter ant lurked in her background. She also noted that all worker ants are female. “That’s probably not true of the engineers at Anthropic.”
Andrew Suarez, an ant ecologist at the University of Illinois, was relieved that the ant story of the week wasn’t “How do I kill them in my house?” and had some advice for the new breed of Ants. In ant societies, cheating “is a very good strategy when it’s rare,” and a terrible one once everybody does it, which is worth knowing for anyone deploying fleets of AI agents, he told me over video, while a mammoth trap-jaw ant from a poster for the sci-fi horror movie “Empire of the Ants” glowered behind him. Suarez added that some colonies settle border disputes without bloodshed: Workers size each other up and “stand on their little toes like stilts,” and the side that looks outmatched withdraws. Perhaps debates among AI safety researchers could be settled on stilettos.
Every biologist will have a sad day when they go looking for an actual ant and instead find an Anthropic employee.Rob Dunn
Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, observed that a leafcutter colony can hold a million workers in underground chambers that “might read as small office cubicles,” he said. “No worker would have a perspective on what’s happening in a different cubicle. They just do their part.” The queen serves namely to make eggs. “I don’t know what the Anthropic analogy is,” he added. “Maybe that’s tokens.”
Some entomologists worry about how Ants may threaten ants. What will data centers’ thirst for water mean for the red harvester ants in drought-stricken Arizona that Gordon has spent dozens of summers studying? What will their constant hum mean for insects that communicate through vibration? Others are seeking guidance from ants, rather than their bosses, on how to better use AI. Next week, Dunn is convening a meeting of entomologists to discuss what lessons scout bees and ants “might offer for thinking about AI models and AI agents.”
Dunn began his career in the Amazon rainforest; now, he notes, if you search for “Amazon” you get page after page of results for the company. “Every biologist will have a sad day when they go looking for an actual ant and instead find an Anthropic employee,” he says. Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Woody Allen (the lead in 1998’s “Antz”), NBA star Anthony “Ant” Edwards, and the nu-metal band Alien Ant Farm may also be sad. “The deeper sadness is how few people are paying attention to the world outside the digital world.”
In the insectarium at the American Museum of Natural History one late afternoon last week, thousands of leafcutter ants were doing thousands of things: slinking, circling, bonking into one another, falling upside down, drowning, crawling, pausing, tickling, sawing, huddling. Nearby, a mother sang “The Ants Go Marching” to her toddler. “Holy shit,” said a young man watching an ant carry a leaf chunk 10 times the size of its body over its head while scaling a pole. Dunn had told me what to look for: individuals “doing absolutely the wrong thing,” and scurrying yonder. That wiggle is how a colony finds a new leaf, a new path, a new tree, he said. “That little wiggle is really important.”
Anthropic burst into public consciousness with an extraordinarily rapid gestation more common in the natural world than in capitalism. Founded just five years ago, it now stands on the brink of becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. Many people who had never heard of it until recently now debate whether it will be responsible for the destruction of the planet.
Yet the real ants have achieved a scale that any tech company would envy. There are some 20 quadrillion ants in the world. If Anthropic had a dollar for every ant, the Ants would have to expand its expected $2 trillion IPO by 10,000. Ants have existed for 150 million years. “They will be around long after we’re all gone,” said Dunn.
Most ants have never been studied, Dunn said. A graduate student of his, who had gone out looking for ants after a breakup, photographed a vampire ant near Raleigh that had been seen only once before. It hasn’t been seen since. “Even as we feel so fancy,” Dunn said, the world is “fundamentally undiscovered.” Also, he added as we were hanging up, ants are delicious.
