Security Theater at Scale? Why Anthropics' “Transparency Frameworks” Are Missing the Point

July 8, 2025

Lorde Astor West Contributor, Founder & CEO RadHash

Anthropic wants you to believe that publishing a transparency framework after spending $100 million on AI R&D is a sign of progress. In some ways, it is. But in reality, it reinforces a pattern the tech industry can’t seem to shake: fixing security issues after they’ve been hardcoded into the system.

According to Anthropic’s newly proposed Targeted Transparency Framework, developers of “frontier” AI systems would voluntarily disclose how they’re handling internal safety protocols, security controls, and red teaming—after they’ve crossed a massive budget threshold.

Sounds responsible, right? Maybe. But it’s already too late.

Most security flaws don’t start at scale. They start in sprint planning.

By the time a model hits nine figures in development cost, it’s often grown on top of an unscalable, patchwork foundation. Vulnerabilities aren’t just bugs—they’re embedded in architecture, assumptions, and code patterns that no one had time to vet because the deadline came first.

This is where OWASP’s Shift Left philosophy makes more sense. Build security in from the beginning, or deal with the fallout when your dependency tree becomes a liability.

We don’t need transparency frameworks. We need security design docs.

If a system isn’t secure by design, transparency reports won’t save it. Instead of treating security like a PR layer, it needs to become a baseline deliverable—alongside your product spec and model card.

Here’s what that looks like:

“Shift left” isn’t a slogan—it’s how you keep zero-days from becoming tomorrow’s headline.

Everyone owns this: not just the security team

Founders need to stop treating security as a compliance checkbox. Investors need to start asking harder questions about system design before term sheets go out. Engineers need tools that catch security issues as they code, not two weeks before launch.

Anthropic’s proposal is a decent start—for the frontier. But the real frontier is earlier, quieter, and more dangerous: it’s the moment you ship your first commit with a known vulnerability, because “we’ll fix it later.”

Final thought

Transparency without early security design is just risk management theater. And we’ve seen how that plays out—log4j, SolarWinds, MOVEit, and more.

The takeaway? Don’t build security into your scale. Build it into your seed.

#Cybersecurity #AppSec #AITrust #OWASP #AIInfrastructure#ShiftLeft #Startups #BuildWithSecurity #RadHash #AICompliance