Can you guess what might happen in 250 years? This is a difficult task, especially when you consider everything that has happened in the last 250 years. The world of 1776 is completely alien to those living in the 2020s.
The people of 1776 lived before such conveniences as indoor plumbing were widespread. No one knew about fundamental scientific concepts like germ theory. The Wright Brothers didn’t even have a twinkle in their father’s eye.
In 2026, we have run out of new ideas, and we are confident that AI will come up with new ideas. So, of course, Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude was recently tasked with making a few predictions for the year 2276, specifically regarding California. As part of the America 250 celebrations, each state and US territory has now contributed a time capsule to be buried in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026. Some states have realized this task, with New Mexico placing a bolo tie and Nevada placing poker chips at £900 a time. But contributions from other states were woeful, with Kansas providing a page listing government officials.
California 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 included the aforementioned predictions, which are obviously difficult to judge because we don’t know what the future holds. But we can watch anyway.
The prognosis was given after feeding Claude desire“Write me a prediction of what California will be like 250 years from July 4th, 2026.” And immediately, it sounds like California is engaged in some kind of soft secession from the United States.
In the 22nd century, California is no longer just a state. After the Pacific Secession Accords of 2089—a decades-long negotiation born out of water rights disputes, the federal grid, and a coast reshaped by three feet of sea-level rise—California officially became the first American member of the Pacific Federation, a constitutional union that also included Oregon, Washington, and Britain. It maintains all ties to the wider United States, but manages its own climate policy, immigration and currency attachments. Sacramento remains the iconic capital; the real center of civic life is now a newly built city called Tidal, built on high ground in what was once the Central Valley, designed for the clockwork floods every forty years.
Gizmodo reached out to Governor Gavin Newsom’s office to ask if the forecast was massaged in any way. We haven’t heard back, but we think it’s very interesting that Claude would essentially predict the creation Cascadiaan idea with roots in the 19th century. Typically, Cascadia only includes Pacific Northwestbut Claude thinks the entire West Coast, including California, will have some autonomy from the federal government on decisions like climate change and water rights.
The forecast also includes a quote from some kind of political leader that is never explained:
“The coast didn’t recede. We did — and then we built a better one.” – Prime Minister Isadora Chen-Nakamura, 2241.
Forecasts highlight how California’s coast could change, including what will happen to coastal areas of Los Angeles. Santa Monica and Venice, both of which touch the Pacific Ocean, will become managed wetlands and marine reserves, Claude said. But greater Los Angeles will also be denser with vertical cities home to millions of people. According to Claude, places like Pasadena and Glendale will have towers of compacted earth and wood by 2276.
Los Angeles, its famous basin now partially submerged along the old coastline, has become a vertical city of extraordinary density. Much of what was once a Santa Monica and Venice area is a managed wetland and marine reserve—an engineered reef system that produces a quarter of Southern California’s protein. Inside, on the high mesas from Pasadena to Glendale, towers of compacted earth cooled by passive systems the twentieth century never imagined, and eleven million people wooden houses. Nobody mourns on highways; In the 2130s, they became linear parks and pneumatic cargo corridors.
The idea of turning highways into pneumatic freight corridors is certainly not new. But the timing of such a transformation will depend on factors that are difficult to predict. It helps to remember that people in the 1970s were convinced that we would run out of oil by the 21st century. It’s entirely possible that people in the 2130s will still be dealing with a US infrastructure no different than the 2020s.
Claude also envisions returning California’s Central Valley, an agricultural heartland, to desert and native grasses.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which collapsed catastrophically in the 2060s, was partially restored through cloud seeding programs and an extensive network of atmospheric water condensers along the ridges. The condenser forests—arrays of solar-powered mesh towers that squeeze moisture from the sea air—are now so old that real trees grow among them, and parts of the range look like an unlikely hybrid of industry and desert. No longer the world’s crop basket, the Central Valley is a mosaic of restored native grasslands, managed aquifer recharge basins, and vertical farming campuses. Agriculture is ninety percent automated and twelve percent of the land; the rest was restored by law.
What is happening to San Francisco? Claude believes that the 2020s will not fall victim to climate change, as many people predict.
San Francisco, the famous underwater is predicted, not – completely. Its famous hills remain above the bay, though the bay itself creeps three blocks inland along the Embarcadero. The old towers of the Financial District now stand in a kind of neo-Venetian structure, their lower floors sealed off and their ground-level entrances replaced by boat docks and elevated pedestrian bridges. The city is magnificent and somewhat unreal, like a cathedral that has been renovated many times and is all the better for it. It is also, by most measures, 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 unfamiliar to its founders in 1850 and surprisingly familiar to its founders in 1976. The state has always been the target.
The phrase “Founders of 1850” makes sense because that’s the year California became a state. But “Founders of 1976” makes no sense as far as I can tell. That year was the bicentennial of the United States, but it is not clear which founders they were referring to. When I typed “Founders of California 1976” into Google, the AI preview first interpreted the query as Spanish missionaries who founded Mission San Francisco de Asís and Mission San Juan Capistrano in present-day Orange County in 1776.
But Google also suggested that I might be talking about the “founders” of Apple, who founded the tech giant in 1976. Did Claude mean it? It’s not obvious, but it’s funny to think of the establishment of Apple as the beginning of a new California.
Claude’s predictions also include insights into languages, including those currently in existence and the yet-to-be-invented so-called Pacific.
The dominant languages are English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, and a new creole called Pacific, a fluid, musical language born in San Gabriel Valley schools and now heard in movies, music, and political speeches. The big question of this century is not race or class in the old sense, but rather the division between the augmented and the unaugmented: those who integrate neural and biological technologies with their cognition and those who do not, by choice or access.
Leave it to Claude to imagine that Hollywood will be little more than a historical record by the year 2276.
Hollywood—now a museum district and architectural heritage site—gradually gave way to a distributed creative economy in which narrative entertainment is co-authored by human artists and AI collaborators under the strict law of attribution. The studios, ironically, still exist; they’re no longer in Los Angeles, no longer making what everyone will recognize as a movie in 2026. California in 2276 is still a figment of the world’s imagination—it’s just changed what it imagines.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his friend in 1788, wishing to see him The world after 300 years– the 21st century we live in now.
Franklin is likely to be shocked by social change as much as technological change. This may be the area where predictions are most difficult. Franklin lived in a time when women did not have the right to vote and chattel slavery was the norm. Ben was often a visionary guy, but if someone could transport him to 2026, he still thinks he’d be in for a bit of a culture shock. The mere concept of condoms would boggle his mind.
Ben couldn’t see any of the changes that have happened in the last few centuries, just like we can’t see 2276. You’ll notice that Claude doesn’t mention anything about the Skynet takeover and the robot wars of the 2250s. Either we have nothing to fear, or Claude is keeping mum so that humanity won’t see it when the robot rebellion starts.
