Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’

“I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world,” Amodei said. “That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.”

Put another way, he said promising that AI will cure cancer is “more a cliche than it is inspiring”; what would actually change people’s opinions of AI would be “actually curing cancer.”

As for regulation, Amodei argued that Baker was painting “a false choice” between distributing AI widely without regulation, or concentrating the technology in the hands of a few companies through regulation.

“I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world,” Amodei said. “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.”

Amodei added that he doesn’t “necessarily agree with that perspective either,” but he said that’s “why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully.”

“We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors,” he said.

Why make those proposals at all? Amodei said that in his view, “AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power” and that “open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chip.”

“By contrast I think the right ‘rules of the road’ can simultaneously (a) address AI’s cyber/bio/alignment risks, (b) institutionally constrain the power of the frontier AI companies, and (c) leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring,” he said.

This post has been updated to include more quotes from Amodei’s posts, including those around open weights.