Cu\u00e9llar now worked for that same company, headquartered in San Francisco\u2019s Foundry Square. And as the king made his speech, Cu\u00e9llar stood nearby before the cameras, not only as Anthropic\u2019s new chief global affairs officer, but as a sibyl to the world\u2019s courts and political systems on the upheavals of this technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose in our world who value deeply our humanity and its vital moral components are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny or our souls,\u201d Charles said to the executives looking on.<\/p>\n
Anthropic announced<\/a> Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s hiring on Aug. 4, to lead policy and \u201cstrategic international engagement\u201d for a trillion-dollar tech company that\u2019s about to go public<\/a>. It\u2019s a company whose technology \u2014 according to the lyrical waxings<\/a> of co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei \u2014 also runs a great risk of undermining the world\u2019s constitutional democracies.<\/p>\n Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s job entails managing Anthropic\u2019s team of lobbyists; working through profound AI policy dilemmas with governments across the globe as the regulatory winds change daily; and balancing Anthropic\u2019s relationships<\/a> with the U.S. government and other countries where the company \u2014 and the general public\u2019s use of AI \u2014 \u200bis growing.<\/p>\n Six people who know Cu\u00e9llar professionally described him as \u201chigh-energy\u201d and \u201ccharming\u201d; former California Gov. Jerry Brown once declared<\/a> he was \u201cbrilliant.\u201d One person who knew Cu\u00e9llar said lobbying was beneath him \u2014 that Cu\u00e9llar was a thinker, an overseer of major research centers. Two were surprised that he joined Anthropic. Two others said they weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n Some can\u2019t help comparing him to his direct counterpart at Anthropic\u2019s fabled archrival, OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane, who has been known for his adversarial relationship with lawmakers.<\/p>\n Where Cu\u00e9llar long evoked praise from government leaders, helped shape California\u2019s first AI safety law<\/a> for Gov. Gavin Newsom, and led efforts to make California courts more accessible, Lehane has described himself<\/a> as a \u201cmaster of disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n Lehane fought against<\/a> early California AI regulation and was involved in the formation of two notorious, hundred-million-dollar anti-regulatory Super PACs that have aggressively pushed the interests of the cryptocurrency and AI industry: Fairshake and Leading the Future (Lehane and the company have since changed their tune after this summer\u2019s cyberattacks). One political staffer, speaking to the New Yorker<\/a> two years ago, described the crypto lobby\u2019s mindset under Lehane in the following terms: \u201cIf you are even slightly critical of us, we won\u2019t just kill you \u2014 we\u2019ll kill your fucking family, we\u2019ll end your career.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTino and Chris could not be more similar and opposite at the same time \u2014 both highly operational, but different morals,\u201d one state political operative told Mission Local.\u00a0<\/p>\n One well-known AI policy researcher, granted anonymity, puts it this way: \u201cBroadly speaking, I\u2019d say Cu\u00e9llar is viewed as more of an AI policy expert and as less of a political operator compared to Lehane.\u201d Cu\u00e9llar is, after all, a man who spoke of needing ethically-aligned AI systems seven years ago in a dimly lit, half-empty lecture room<\/a> at Harvard when concepts like AI \u201cmisalignment\u201d were far more esoteric. (Misalignment is when models purportedly operate in ways human developers did not intend.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Anthropic declined to make Cu\u00e9llar available for an interview. Mission Local was left to interview the people in Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s professional orbit, along with his published papers and recorded public talks. From all, it appears that Cu\u00e9llar was on a path to being AI\u2019s global diplomat well before Anthropic even existed.<\/p>\n Pathogens<\/p>\n Cu\u00e9llar was born in 1972, on the southern bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, a Mexican city across the border from Brownsville, Texas. On school days, Cu\u00e9llar would ride to the United States through (as described in past remarks<\/a>) \u201cdusty, narrow streets between crumbling buildings\u201d each morning to the border crossing, and then across a bridge on foot to St. Joseph Academy, a preparatory school in Brownsville.<\/p>\n It was impossible, at that time, for Cu\u00e9llar \u201cnot to notice the machines,\u201d he said in 2019<\/a>. He recalled the smallest details: The border inspectors typing in license plates as cars neared the checkpoint, their \u201cbrows furrowing\u201d as Cu\u00e9llar wondered \u201cwhat automotive sequence was being served up on their screens.\u201d\u00a0He said he would ask himself if these machines would make the inspectors \u201cmore predictable in their decisions,\u201d or \u201cmore intimidating for those crossing the border.\u201d<\/p>\n When Cu\u00e9llar was 14, the family moved to Calexico, California, a city linked with its much larger neighbor, Mexicali, the capital of Baja California in Mexico. Here, Cu\u00e9llar studied with farmworker children who struggled with English, and observed firsthand the heavily-policed nature of the border.<\/p>\n He reflected on this, speaking to Stanford Magazine<\/a> in 2013, as the director of Stanford\u2019s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where his research topics included citizenship, immigration, public health and national security threats involving cyber-security. He argued that the throughline in his work looked at how \u201csocieties and legal systems\u201d take on problems so difficult to solve that they\u2019re not likely \u201cto be completely solved \u2014 ever.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor example, will we ever completely be able to know everything about what happens at our border? Everything that happens on the Mexican side and on the American side? Every single package that comes in, every single little particle that flies across the border, every tiny little bit of a potential pathogen that comes across in the food supply? Not likely.\u201d<\/p>\n One high-level Carnegie Endowment leader, who did not work with Cu\u00e9llar until many years after this 2013 interview, called Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s approach to problem solving \u201ccharismatic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s incredibly energetic \u2014 not fidgety, but he has a physical engagement with ideas in a way that brings energy into a room,\u201d the person told Mission Local.<\/p>\n After graduating from Calexico High School, Cu\u00e9llar was magna cum laude at Harvard, obtained his Ph.D. in political science at Stanford, and studied law at Yale. By 2013, Cu\u00e9llar, then in his early forties, had worked as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and on \u201cjustice and regulation\u201d policy under the Obama administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n While director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford, Cu\u00e9llar was asked to a meeting with then-governor Jerry Brown, where the two spent much of their hour \u2014 as he recalled in 2016<\/a> \u2014 discussing nuclear proliferation, of all things, and the German sociologist Max Weber, whose theories have often inspired<\/a> AI research. A month later, Cu\u00e9llar received a call from Brown while traveling through San Francisco International Airport. Brown wanted Cu\u00e9llar to sit on the state\u2019s high court.\u00a0<\/p>\n He took the oath on Jan. 5, 2015.\u00a0<\/p>\n To \u2018wear the state like an exoskeleton\u2019<\/p>\n Cu\u00e9llar wrote 99 opinions<\/a> in his six years on the panel. One of those was for the case In re Humphrey, barring California from jailing people before their trials because they couldn\u2019t afford bail. Damon Silver, head of the Santa Clara County public defender\u2019s office, called the ruling \u201ca quantum leap\u201d for pretrial detention reform.<\/p>\n Cu\u00e9llar voted with the majority of his fellow justices 94% of the time<\/a> on criminal cases throughout his tenure, or in 276 out of 293 cases. These statistics did not distinguish him from most of California\u2019s high court justices, a notoriously collegial<\/a> panel. Yet his work changed courthouses up and down California.\u00a0<\/p>\n From 2015 through 2019, he led a state task force focused on language access in court that increased funding for translators, brought more of them into court, and piloted video interpretation. It was a huge success, said Douglas Denton, who worked with Cu\u00e9llar at the Judicial Council of California and managed the language program for seven years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe once told me he liked working with me because I could keep up with him and his ideas,\u201d Denton said, clearly pleased with the notion.<\/p>\n The high court did not have Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s sole attention. One of his earliest writings on artificial intelligence appeared in 2016<\/a>, when he was also a visiting professor at Stanford. The paper was about AI\u2019s future role in government agency decision-making.\u00a0<\/p>\n That was less than a year after Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others came together to form OpenAI, at the time still a relatively small research lab. And it was five years before a civil war at the company \u2014 over the pace of safe AI development \u2014 birthed another, called Anthropic.<\/p>\n In a 2019 lecture, Cu\u00e9llar reflected on how certain problems in public policy and law are \u201croughly analogous to problems in artificial intelligence \u2014 how to decide when you don\u2019t have anywhere near the information you need to make a precise decision, how to define what it means to be rational or reasonable, how to acquire new information or challenge in some cases your prior assumptions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A path would soon emerge for him to hash them out himself.<\/p>\n Cu\u00e9llar resigned from the state Supreme Court after he was named, in September 2021, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the nonpartisan international affairs think tank established in 1910, on the 75th birthday of the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who sought to \u201chasten the abolition of international war.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After 115 years, the endowment has widely become known as one of the most influential think tanks in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cHere is someone who has moved across many different domains of authority and government, including Carnegie, an institution that sits at the peak of international diplomatic activity and has access to the people involved in that diplomacy,\u201d said Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago law professor who researched AI regulation with Cu\u00e9llar before he joined the AI company. \u201cIt\u2019s rare to find someone who has done that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n At Carnegie, Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s AI ponderings grew more urgent, writing about AI\u2019s potential role in democratic backsliding. He co-authored a call<\/a> for the creation of a national registry for large AI models in 2023, the same year he helped propose an international panel on AI safety<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2025, he co-authored a paper<\/a> warning of highly-capable AI agent swarms and their ability to destabilize democracy, and how a perfectly obedient, AI-run bureaucracy \u201cwould let leaders wear the state like an exoskeleton, sidestepping human checks and balances.\u201d<\/p>\n Wicked problems<\/p>\n In the planning and policy worlds, \u201cwicked problems\u201d are those that cannot be neatly solved because of incomplete, contradictory, and ever-changing forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n A swarm of these erupted, in 2024, around an AI safety bill that moved with great momentum through Sacramento\u2019s legislative halls. The bill, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, would have required leading AI firms to maintain a kill switch for AI models and let third party auditors observe their safety protocols.\u00a0<\/p>\n Newsom ultimately sided with critics \u2014 including Anthropic, though the company later tempered its stance \u2014 who called the law\u2019s basis \u201chypothetical,\u201d and vetoed SB 1047 (Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s now-counterpart at OpenAI, Lehane, publicly applauded the veto). Then Newsom commissioned a group to produce a report on options for AI policymaking.<\/p>\n That June 2025 report\u2019s topline authors were the renowned mathematician and computer scientist Jennifer Tour Chayes, the \u201cGodmother of AI\u201d Fei-Fei Li, and \u2014 who else \u2014 Cu\u00e9llar.\u00a0The report shaped Wiener\u2019s weaker compromise AI safety law<\/a>, SB 53, which dropped the kill switches and auditor mandates but spelled out transparency requirements for AI firms, the first law of its kind in the country.<\/p>\n Half a year later, and while still at Carnegie, Cu\u00e9llar joined Anthropic\u2019s ethical advisory board, known as the Long Term Benefit Trust, which the company itself called an \u201cexperiment of corporate governance.\u201d The company says the trust seeks to balance the interests of the public \u2014 i.e., preventing potentially catastrophic cybersecurity breaches \u2014 alongside the interests of Anthropic\u2019s stockholders.\u00a0<\/p>\n Between June and July this year, autonomous AI programs exploited a software flaw during an internal evaluation at OpenAI. A \u201cswarm\u201d of those agents left secret messages for each other, faked parts of their own activity logs, and hacked an external company called Hugging Face, according to an independent report from the AI research nonprofits METR and Redwood Research.<\/p>\n The incident\u2019s disclosure was the first of its kind, and sparked similar announcements at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other firms in the subsequent weeks. The incidents triggered widespread questions about human researchers\u2019 ability to audit highly-capable, autonomous systems and understand what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n The circus nearly overshadowed an Anthropic announcement in that same month: Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s hiring as chief global affairs officer. Still, one AI safety group, an advocacy organization known as the Midas Project, raised objections<\/a> to the hire over \u201crevolving door\u201d concerns. The group said Cu\u00e9llar\u2019s move from a group meant to oversee Anthropic into its chief global affairs officer raised \u201cquestions about the board\u2019s independence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be a bad thing if any of those board members, who were supposed to be making ethical decisions about a company, were disinclined from making decisions that bear negatively on the industry because they expect to later be employed by that company,\u201d Tyler Johnston, the executive director of the Midas Project told Mission Local.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet even Johnston, who does not know Cu\u00e9llar, acknowledged his hiring was a smart move: \u201cSome people would see it as a negative \u2014 like you\u2019re selling out to the industry. Maybe I would feel that way if it was a gambling company, but this is such a crucial and profoundly changing technology, to have people like him in the room is generally a positive thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Two people who knew Cu\u00e9llar professionally said the same.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s not blinded by one way of thinking or the other,\u201d said the Carnegie Endowment leader who worked with Cu\u00e9llar. \u201cAI presents positives and negatives at a moment where democracy is backsliding \u2014 many people are dancing just one of those lines and can\u2019t hold those multiple truths at one time. Tino can.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Mariano-Florentino_Cuellar.jpg\")
Justice Cu\u00e9llar at his swearing-in ceremony for his appointment at the California Supreme Court. Photo credit: Brad Alexander, Office of the Governor.<\/p>\n![\"Wide](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Birds_eye_view_of_Mexicali_and_Calexico_LCCN2007664558.tif.jpg\")
Birds eye view of Mexicali and Calexico in 1911. Photo credit: Library of Congress.<\/p>\n![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MEXICAN_GREEN_CARD_FARMWORKER_JUGO_OLIVAS_AND_HIS_WIFE_CROSS_BORDER_AT_CALEXICO_TO_SHOP_IN_AMERICAN_.jpeg\")
A Mexican green card farmworker and his wife cross the border at Calexico to shop in U.S. stores in April 1974. Photo credit: Charles O\u2019Rear, National Archives.<\/p>\n![\"Seven](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/CA-Supreme-Court-2019.jpg\")
Tino Cu\u00e9llar (third from right) was a justice on the California Supreme Court from 2015 to 2021. Photo credit: Supreme Court of California.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Andrew_Carnegie_on_the_houseboat_The_Everglades_off_Palm_Beach.jpg\")
On November 25, 1910, the Scottish American industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to \u201chasten the abolition of international war.\u201d Photo credit: American Press Association.<\/p>\n