What is an Anthropic Project?

This is not an article about Anthropic PBC, makers of Claude AI. Long before AI, scientists have been thinking about the immense effects humans were having on the planet. For some time now they’ve been using the word anthropocene to describe the time period. Anthropocene combines two Greek words to describe the period since humans have dominated earth. It translates literally to the "age of man," and is used the way we use “cretaceous” to describe the age of Tyrannosaurus rex. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, to as recently as the 1960s. 

An anthropic project is human effort that provides a universal benefit, not purely for humans, but all life and the processes that sustain it. Such ideals are present in religion, theology and philosophical responses to the demands of the physical world. The pursuit of anthropic projects has driven human community formation for millennia. As our knowledge and abilities have grown, so has our responsibility to refine those drivers. It is a never ending process that requires constant attention and cooperation. Our lives, and now the lives of almost every other creature on Earth are bound by them. The Anthropocene is happening today. You're part of it, just as I am, and what we build affects the lives of every other creature on the planet, each other, and perhaps the future of the universe.

Apples

Life begins deep within our star. In its core hydrogen fuses into helium, and the energy released claws outward for tens of thousands of years before the surface lets it go. It then radiates out in all directions, crossing the distance to Earth in eight minutes where it lands on the leaves of plants like the Malus sieversii-- the wild apple. 

Humans have tended apples for thousands of years. They began as M. sieversii in the Tian Shan mountains near Kazakhstan, but as we carried them west along the Silk Road, they crossed with wild crabapples so thoroughly that the modern apple, Malus Domestica are now closer kin to a sour European crab than to their own ancestor. The M. Domestica genome contains so much potential their seeds won't breed true to the fruit they’re extracted from, so every variety we prize — Granny Smith, Red Delicious — survives only through the covenant of grafting.

Grafting apples is an anthropic project. A graft is an agreement between humans that enjoy a particular expression of apples and the branches that produce them. We meticulously breed a tree whose fruit we like, then graft its branches onto other trees. Those branches, branch themselves and as long as we keep cutting and grafting the original tree may die, but its fruit continues to grow as long as there is a human willing to keep a cutting alive and incorporate it onto a living tree. This is process surrounding the agreement to produce and enjoy fruit, is a covenant.

We’ve experimented with apple’s massive genome for a long time and produced varieties enjoyed by billions of humans and animals all over the world. You can fight a war over oil or gold because they can be seized and held; you cannot easily fight one over apples, because anyone locked out can develop their own. Anyone who doesn’t like an existing apple can produce a new one. The apple is so vast and free, it seems it can never be enclosed as private property. Soldiers and civilians on both sides of every war have eaten them and no one has ever marched to take them. There are more than enough, and it seems there always will be.

Rats

Apples get their genetic potential from being part of the biosphere, the collection of all living things on Earth, large and small. The same biosphere holds the rat, the passenger pigeon, and the humans who make and break covenants. Rats are animals Asian origin that rode in our hulls wherever we sailed — propagation with no covenant, no terms, no one tending them. These creatures spread in the wake of our commerce and exploration. At times we’ve eaten them, others we’ve exterminated them. Other times their unchecked presence exterminated us, such as during the Black Death that ravaged Europe. Today, we do have a covenant with rats, likely because we cannot wipe them out. Aware that they spread disease and ruin stores, people have tried at times to rid themselves of rats, but these creatures can live in places we would dare not go under circumstances that we cannot stand. Today rats and mice make up 95% of the mammals used in biomedical research and development. We keep them alive in labs, and could care less about them, as long as they stay out of sight around our homes and stores. 

The North American passenger pigeon's covenant ran in a different direction: it once crossed the continent in flocks that darkened the sky for hours, but it only took a few decades for market hunters and loggers who destroyed their breeding habitats to drive the most abundant bird on the continent down to an individual dying alone in a zoo. We held no covenant with the pigeon, we simply hunted it until it was no more. This is an old habit for humans. The giant sloth, the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo and many other species have been destroyed for lack of covenant relationship with us. 

We are a young species of ape — better than any creature alive at moving information between us. Quick to build tools to accomplish our goals, but slow to feel the implications of our actions. The apple, the rat, and the pigeon are not three facts about us. They are one power used three ways: carried faithfully, spilled carelessly, or spent until nothing is left. It was never the pigeon’s job to establish covenant with us. They were not intelligent enough, and apparently neither were we.

Ireland

When the Milesians left Iberia and sailed north, they invaded an island west of Britain. Upon landing they were met by a native woman who prophesied their victory and prosperity. Pleased by her words, they asked her what she wanted. They did not know she was the goddess of the land, and she demanded that her name remain on it despite their victory in the battle to come. Later they would earn that victory, and those who thought they would win by earning the land instead drowned in the sea, while those who kept faith with the goddess came to possessed it. Her name was Ériu, and the island still carries it — Éire, the land we call Ireland.

Every time you say the name Ireland, you propagate an ancient covenant few know exists. The covenant between the land and the invaders has lasted thousands of years. Ireland placed 15th of 147 nations in the 2025 World Happiness Report, and the report ranked it first in the world for GDP per capita. Many such covenants exist around the world, struck between people and gods or another. Each shares the same goal — propagation. The land of Ireland sought to propagate whatever people lived upon it, so long as she was able to keep her name, and the people kept the name in order to obtain her promise. 

Similar stories describe mutual respect and reciprocity between people and land around the world, though notably nations like the US have no such stories thus polluting and defiling the land without remorse. Where there is no covenant, there is only mechanism.   

Abraham

For all the good in Ériu's covenant, it stays where she stood — bound to one island and the people who keep faith on it. The covenant of Abraham is different. It begins by leaving.

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. — Genesis 12:1–3 (KJV)

The covenant of YHWH — given to Abram, soon renamed Abraham — is rooted like Ériu's: it names a land, Canaan, and a people, a great nation. What sets it apart is its reach. Its blessing is not for one island or one tribe but for "all the families of the earth," and it is everlasting — terms built to outrun their own borders and never expire. That is the leap from Ireland: a local covenant becomes a universal promise.

And it outran Abraham past all recognition, propagating into the three faiths that still carry his name. Judaism, the oldest and most particular branch, keeps the covenant by enduring. Christianity and Islam carried it outward to the rest of the world — restoration in one telling, incorporation in the other — until today more than four billion people live inside the promise. For most of that history, the three of them have been the closest thing to a universal covenant our species has managed.

But something happened on the way: the covenant was captured. It happened among the faiths, as each came to claim it was the only faithful keeper of terms written for everyone. And it happened, quietly, in the orchard. The apple I called the one thing no one could enclose — the commons anyone could graft their way into — is being enclosed after all. Club varieties like Cosmic Crisp and Pink Lady now grow only under license: royalties paid, contracts signed, the cutting no longer free to whoever keeps it alive. A blessing meant for all the families of the earth, fenced by the families themselves.

UNIX

Covenants kept evolving. Currency became a covenant of exchange among people who share an economy. Intellectual property law — copyright, patent, and trademark — became a covenant with governments, meant to protect those who made new things from anyone who would profit without sharing, or bury the work before the sharing was complete. Both became programs people could strategize over: profit through exclusive rights and licensing, through interest and credit. But like the covenant of Abraham, they came to facilitate enclosure — open knowledge fenced off by whoever held the rights. Economies divided; ideas any mind could grasp became the exclusive property of individuals and corporations to produce, modify, and distribute. This brings us to the modern age, when nearly every purposeful act is patented, trademarked, or copyrighted.

In 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. A 1956 antitrust consent decree had barred AT&T from any business but the telephone, so it could not sell UNIX as a product; instead it licensed the system cheaply, source code included, and a generation of programmers grew up reading and reshaping it. UNIX became a commons almost by accident of law.

Then it was fenced. As AT&T grasped what it had, its 1979 license forbade universities from teaching the source, and after the 1984 breakup freed the company to commercialize, UNIX became expensive proprietary property. The answer came a few years later, and it was the decisive invention. Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983, founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and by the end of the decade had written the first of the GNU licenses. They flipped the logic of copyright: the author still holds the copyright, but releases the work so that anyone may use, modify, and redistribute it — on one condition, that every version they pass on carries the same freedom forward. Closed code could no longer be built from open code. The covenant had learned to defend itself.

From that ground grew a clean break. In 1987, Andrew Tanenbaum wrote MINIX from scratch as a teaching system — necessary precisely because the real UNIX source could no longer be taught. Frustrated by its limits, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds wrote his own kernel from scratch in 1991. He meant to call it Freax; a colleague managing the server where it was first uploaded renamed the directory "Linux" without asking, and the name stuck — the maker forgotten almost before he began. In 1992, Torvalds placed it under the GNU General Public License, version 2. That kernel, Linux, now runs most of the servers that carry the internet. One gap remained: the GPL's protections trigger when software is distributed, but running modified code as a network service is not distribution — so cloud providers could build on the commons through software as a service (SaaS) and give nothing back. The Affero GPL, version 3, released in 2007, closed that loophole by treating access over a network as distribution. It is the strongest of the copyleft covenants, and today it is used to build a digital commons — a collection of resources no one owns and everyone may use.

NTARI

In 2021, I was trying to start a farm in Bakingili, Cameroon, to grow a crop that would help the national government hold onto the funding it received through Western support programs. My theory was that by producing the goods locally, they would expand their economy and the money would become truly profitable rather than a lifeline for paying expenses. The project failed, but the logic remained, so I set out to build a local agriculture coordination system called AgriNet.

At the time, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, GrubHub, and Airbnb were disrupting their respective markets with enhanced communication protocols. I noticed this, and marveled in disgust that communication systems could be deployed in this captured state — and that I was about to do the same with agriculture.

The global agriculture industry is worth several trillion dollars. I came to realize that owning that much currency would make me responsible for directing activities far beyond the scope of my expertise in communications. I might become a billionaire, or worse. Unwilling to let that happen, I dove into open source and discovered AGPL-3. I founded a nonprofit, the Network Theory Applied Research Institute, Inc., to be steward of the software and others like it. In the process, I discovered the thread I've spent this article tracing.

Today, AgriNet is copyrighted and released under AGPL-3. Volunteers at the Institute are putting the finishing touches on it before we begin our marketing campaigns. We're also developing a distributed cloud orchestrator and several other projects that help communities improve their communication, and with it their social and economic abilities.

NTARI is my anthropic project. It is a covenant made with every person on the planet, now and in the future: to freely give my inspiration to those who can improve it, and so improve their communities. As an African American, I know what it is to live in a community where the social and economic dominants believe human cooperation is always a matter of competition, and who deeply fear scarcity. This is my way to fix that — for them, for everyone, everywhere, all at once. I encourage you to find your own anthropic project. You don't have to found a nonprofit. You could ride instead of drive, keep plastic out of the water, refuse the food that costs the world too much, or simply make one thing and give it away under terms the next person has to honor too. But you do have to broadcast a promise, and keep it. It can be a commitment to act, or to refrain; the potential runs both ways.

Humans are so capable a species that our covenants affect all life. When we go to war over broken ones, we destroy lives far beyond our own. So we must choose our covenants carefully, and remember that we did not author them. We are agents of a covenant far older than ourselves — older even than the starlight that fell on the first apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan, light that was forged in the core of our sun. By keeping the covenant, we lend our own agency to the energy and information that lends us existence.

Our sun has about five billion years left before it swells and changes beyond all recognition — but its covenant with life on Earth will run out long before that. As it slowly brightens, the oceans will likely boil within a billion years or so. Between now and then, we have the opportunity to refract its light beyond this planet, beyond the solar system, perhaps one day beyond the galaxy. Born of a single star, we could link its legacy to other stars and other worlds, weaving a network of life to the limits of space and time.

But the network is only a possibility, and the same hand that could weave it could let it fall. We are the asteroid and the ark at once — the power to end the project and the power to carry it are a single power, and which one we become is settled not in some final hour but in every ordinary choice to keep a covenant or break it. The sun has already made its choice: it pours itself out and asks nothing back. An anthropic project is the decision to do the same with whatever light we are handed — to give it freely, to everyone, on behalf of an order we did not originate, and to set it down still burning in a hand that comes after. We are living light, briefly able to choose which way it spreads.