Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Wants Us to Think He’s Building a God

He acts like he has special knowledge about how best to regulate his company. But he’s a CEO like any CEO, and he wants what all CEOs want: to write his own rules.

Ahead of going public, Anthropic is nearing a $1 trillion valuation, surpassing OpenAI—now valued at $862 billion—to become the world’s most valuable AI company. Not long after that news broke, on Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post and policy framework outlining his preferred way for AI companies like Anthropic to be regulated. Not for the first time, he warns that his company’s products promise both an ill-defined set of benefits and potentially catastrophic risks that “could even threaten humanity itself.”

Luckily for us, he has a plan to keep the products that are making him rich from wiping everyone out. Amodei suggests the government should “have the power to block or deter deployment” of models it deems too risky. He calls for frontier large language models to be subjected to technical testing and auditing; workplace protections against AI-related job displacement; coordination among “allied democracies” against “adversaries”; and limits on the use of LLMs’ use in warfare and for domestic surveillance. Anthropic has previously suggested that a pause on frontier model development might be worthwhile, but—for now—impossible, as it might allow “the least cautious actors catch up technologically.” Like OpenAI’s progressive-coded “New Deal,” Amodei’s vision contains plenty of nice-enough-sounding ideas that are unlikely to be implemented so long as Donald Trump is in the White House and our political system is being pumped full of donations from Amodei’s fabulously wealthy, openly reactionary colleagues in Silicon Valley. Amodei, of course, laments the lack of global coordination on these issues, and the disconnect between the scale of the problem at hand and the pace of policymaking: “We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly........

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