Dario Amodei spent Saturday night arguing with himself on national television.
The Anthropic CEO was spoofed last night by Jane Wickline in her first season as a repertory player on “Saturday Night Live,” playing Amodei as a bumbling megalomaniac struggling to explain why his own technology won’t end the world.
In Wickline’s portrayal, Amodei has two personalities: one media-trained and the other frighteningly not.
Several times during the segment, the two personalities talk to each other.
When Weekend Update host Michael Che asks Wickline about the pros of AI, the two Amodeis exchange words. “Land the plane, Dario,” the media-trained one says. “I can’t,” says the other.
Earlier this month, the real Dario Amodei published a very grave essay on his personal website, in which he said AI models were quickly getting out of control and argued for a coordinated slowdown among frontier AI companies and for government regulation.
His essay came at the fever pitch of the AI doomsday debate, which heated up a few days earlier when former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit the company and embarked on a media tour, warning that AI labs were “gambling with our lives.” President Donald Trump, for his part, mocked Amodei in a Truth Social post, accusing him of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.'” Trump has signaled strong disinterest in regulating AI, though he did pledge last week to create an “AI Force” that would “watch over” AI companies.
In recent weeks, Amodei has been stridently promoting Anthropic breakthroughs in medical research and protein structure, and has stopped making dire predictions about an AI doomsday.
The AI safety warnings have so far failed to convince a plurality in Washington or Silicon Valley that the development of the tech should be paused or slowed.
Still, that didn’t stop “SNL.” “AI is the devil and I its maker!” Wickline as Amodei said on the show.
The segment drew at least one fan in the AI world: Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist and a longtime critic of AI doomerism, responded to a clip of Wickline’s Amodei impression on X with a string of laughing emojis.
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