😺 Anthropic CEO denies wanting to rule AI alone

A public fight over AI power spilled into the open after investor Gavin Baker said sources told him Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks the future could leave just Anthropic and governments standing. Baker called that hubristic and compared it to founder delusion on the scale of SBF. Not exactly a quiet disagreement.

Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas answered fast on X, saying the claim was completely false. His version of Anthropic’s view is almost the opposite: the company worries about any one player getting too much power, not about too much competition disappearing.

Baker kept pressing the point, arguing that Amodei’s repeated warnings about AI dangers such as bioweapons and mass job loss have helped trigger the backlash now building around AI data centers and have weakened momentum for federal regulation. That set up Amodei’s reply, which landed in a two-part post and drew about 10 million views in a day.

Amodei rejected the idea that there are only two choices for AI safety: heavy rules that hand power to a few giants, or no rules at all. He pointed to California’s SB53, a transparency law that Anthropic supported, as an example of policy that would weigh more heavily on frontier labs like his than on smaller rivals. He also said the public’s unease is really a crisis of trust, driven by years of companies promising more than they delivered.

He added a personal note. Amodei said his father died of Hepatitis C a few years before sofosbuvir became available, and that the drug now cures 95% of patients. For him, that is part of the case for using AI on disease. The argument is no longer just about model quality. It’s about whether people believe the people building these systems still deserve the keys.