Anthropic’s Dario Amodei gets the SNL treatment

Saturday Night Live used its Weekend Update stage to poke at the AI industry's latest doom talk, with Jane Wickline playing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a sketch built around his recent warnings.

Michael Che opened the bit by describing Amodei as someone who had “stumbled through a press tour,” and he sounded a little unsure about how to say the executive’s last name. That set the tone. The joke was less about Anthropic’s product and more about the tone of a very public AI warning campaign that has been making the rounds.

Wickline’s Amodei came out with an oversized wig and answers that kept slipping sideways. At points, the performance veered into a kind of Gollum-style argument with a dark side, including the line: “AI is the devil and I its maker.” The sketch leaned hard into the idea that the people warning about AI are also the people building it.

That contradiction was the whole punchline. Wickline-as-Amodei told the audience that AI executives “are all on the same page here: We do not condone what we are doing.” She also put it bluntly: “AI is not a weapon, it’s a tool: A tool for building weapons.” And then came the mock plea: “I urge you to urge me to stop.” The bit even took a swing at the optimistic side of AI hype, with a joke that there’s “about a 10% chance” cancer won’t be a problem in 10 years.