The people of 1776 were living before the widespread adoption of conveniences like indoor plumbing. No one knew about fundamental scientific concepts like germ theory. The Wright Brothers were not even a twinkle in their father’s eyes.
Here in 2026, we have run out of new ideas and we have bet on AI with some new ideas. So, of course, Anthropic’s AI chatbot Cloud was recently tasked with making a number of predictions for the year 2276, specifically involving California. As part of the America 250 celebrations, each state and US territory has now contributed a time capsule that will be buried in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026. Some states understood the assignment, including bolo ties in New Mexico and poker chips in a 900-pound time capsule in Nevada. But contributions from other states were pitiful, with Kansas submitting a page listing government officials.
California arguably did the best work, including a qubit chip from the University of California, Berkeley, a fusion conductor segment from General Atomics, and a NASA photo of California from space. California also includes the above predictions, which are obviously hard to predict because we don’t know what will happen in the future. But we can take a look anyway.
The forecast was made after prompting Claude, “Write me a prediction for what California will be like in 250 years from July 4, 2026.” And quite simply, it seems as if California is engaged in a kind of soft secession from the United States.
By the 22nd century, California was no longer just a state. Following the Pacific Secession Agreement of 2089 – a decades-long negotiation born out of water rights disputes, federal gridlock and the reshaping of the coast by three feet of sea rise – California formally became the first U.S. member-state of the Pacific Federation, a constitutional union that also includes Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. It retains all ties with the broader United States, but controls its own climate policy, immigration, and currency supplements. Sacramento remains the symbolic capital; The true center of civic life is now a newly built city called Tidal, built on high ground in what was once the Central Valley, prepared for the floods that occur every forty years.
Gizmodo contacted Governor Gavin Newsom’s office to ask if the prediction was made in any way. We haven’t heard back, but we find it very interesting that Cloud would essentially predict the creation of Cascadia, an idea that has its roots in the 19th century. Typically, Cascadia only includes the Pacific Northwest, but Cloud thinks the entire West Coast, including California, would get some autonomy from the federal government in decisions like climate change and water rights.
The prophecy also includes a quote from a political leader, which has never been explained:
“The coast didn’t back down. We did – and then we built something better.” – Premier Isadora Chen-Nakamura, 2241.
The idea of how California’s coast might change is prominent in predictions, including what will happen to coastal areas of Los Angeles. According to Claude, Santa Monica and Venice, which both touch the Pacific Ocean, will become managed wetlands and marine sanctuaries. But Greater Los Angeles will also be much denser, with millions of people living in vertical cities. Inland, there will be up to 2276 compressed clay and wood towers in places like Pasadena and Glendale, according to Cloud.
Los Angeles, its famous basin now partially submerged along the old shoreline, has developed as a vertical city of extraordinary density. Much of what was once Santa Monica and Venice is a managed wetlands and marine sanctuary – an engineered reef system that produces a quarter of Southern California’s protein. Inland, on high mesas from Pasadena through Glendale, towers of compressed earth and the wooden homes of eleven million people, cooled by passive systems whose construction the twentieth century never imagined. No one mourns the free path; They were replaced by linear parks and pneumatic freight corridors in the 2130s.
The idea of turning freeways into pneumatic freight corridors is certainly not new. But the timing of such transformation will depend on factors that are difficult to predict. It helps to remember that people in the 1970s were convinced we would run out of oil by the 21st century. It’s entirely possible that people in the 2130s will still be toiling with American infrastructure that isn’t much different from the 2020s.
Claude also envisions California’s Central Valley, an agricultural center, returning to forests and native grasses.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which catastrophically collapsed in the 2060s, has been partially restored through cloud-seeding programs and a vast network of atmospheric water condensers along the ridgeline. Condenser forests – solar-powered chains of mesh towers that draw moisture from the sea air – are now so old that actual trees have grown through them, making parts of the range look like some unlikely hybrid of industry and forest. The Central Valley, no longer the world’s produce basket, is a mix of restored native grasslands, managed aquifer recharge basins and vertical farming complexes. Agriculture is ninety percent automated and twelve percent land; The rest have been re-wilded by law.
What will happen to San Francisco? It seems that Claude believes that it will not become a victim of climate change in the way that many predict for 2020.
San Francisco, which was famously predicted to be underwater, is actually not. Its famous hills rise above the bay, although the bay extends three blocks inland along the Embarcadero. The old towers of the Financial District now stand in a kind of neo-Venetian arrangement, their lower floors sealed off and their ground level entrances replaced by boat docks and elevated pedestrian bridges. The city is grand and slightly surreal, like a cathedral that has been renovated several times and is all the better for it. By most measurements, it is also the most expensive place to exist in the known world.
The strangest part of Claude’s predictions comes in a line about the “founders” of California.
Demographically, the California of 2276 is a place that its founders of 1850 would not recognize and its founders of 1976 would find extremely familiar. The state has always been a destination.
The phrase “Founders of 1850” makes sense because that’s the year California became a state. But as far as I can tell, “1976 founders” doesn’t mean anything. That year was America’s Bicentennial, but it’s not clear what kind of Founders they’re talking about. When I typed “Founders of California 1976” into Google, the AI preview first interpreted the query as Spanish missionaries in 1776 who founded Mission San Francisco de Asís and Mission San Juan Capistrano in what is today Orange County.
But Google also said that maybe I was talking about the “founders” of Apple, who started the tech giant in 1976. Is this what Claude meant? It’s vague, but it’s fun to think of Apple’s founding as the beginning of a new California.
Cloud’s prophecies also include ideas about languages, including those that currently exist as well as a language that has not yet been invented called Pacifican.
The major languages are English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, and an emerging creole called Pacifica – a fluid, musical language that originated in the schools of the San Gabriel Valley and is now heard in film, music, and political speeches. The big question of this century is not race or class in the old sense, but the divide between the augmented and the non-augmented: those who have integrated neural and biological technologies into their cognition and those who have not, by choice or access.
And leave it to Cloud to imagine that Hollywood will be little more than a historical footnote by 2276.
Hollywood – now a museum district and architectural heritage zone – has gradually given way, in part, to a distributed creative economy in which narrative entertainment is co-authored by human artists and AI collaborators under strict attribution laws. Ironically, the studios still exist; They’re no longer in Los Angeles, no longer making what anyone in 2026 would recognize as movies. The California of 2276 is still the world’s imagination – it’s just changed what it imagined.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a friend in 1788 in which he wished he could see the world in 300 years – the 21st century we are now experiencing.
Franklin would probably have been equally startled by technological changes as well as social changes. This may be the area where predictions become most difficult. Franklin lived at a time when women did not have the right to vote, and chattel slavery was the norm. Ben was often a forward-thinking guy, but one can imagine he would still get a bit of culture shock if he were transplanted to the year 2026. The concept of condoms alone will boggle his mind.
Ben didn’t get to see any of the changes that have occurred over the past few centuries, just as we won’t get to see 2276. But hopefully, there are still people out there to read these predictions. You’ll notice that Cloud doesn’t mention anything about the Skynet takeover and the robot wars of the 2250s. Either we have nothing to fear, or Cloud is keeping quiet to ensure that humanity doesn’t notice when the robot rebellion begins.
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