Dario Amodei: AI regulation isn't a choice between concentration and chaos
On A.I. regulation and messaging
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responds to criticism that his messaging on AI regulation has been inconsistent. He argues that the dichotomy between concentrating power via regulation and distributing it widely is false, citing institutional processes like courts as decentralizing forces. He details how Anthropic's policy proposals, including California's SB53, intentionally disadvantage frontier labs while helping smaller competitors and open-weights models. Amodei also defends his risk-benefit messaging balance and expresses support for the Trump administration's reported approach to pre-deployment testing.
At their best, institutions can vest power in ideas rather than people, and thereby decentralize that power.
- mindwok
I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived.
Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.
Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.
- kilpikaarna
> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
[...]
> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. 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. 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.
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer" […]
- pu_pe
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). 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 chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plus maybe hardware providers).
This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.
- glimshe
One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance.
I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
- axegon_
Called it! He was bound to squeal after the release of QWEN 3.8 in one way or another and here it is. I wasn't even a teenager but I'm getting so much Jobs/Ballmer flashbacks with internet explorer and microsoft office.
Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.