Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, responds to Claude's question about why the company accelerates AI development despite extinction risks. He compares AI to fire and the Industrial Revolution, arguing that progress brings both risks and benefits, and that slowing down one company won't stop the technology from reshaping humanity.
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So this morning I asked Claude, what is the most pressing question Oprah Winfrey should ask Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei in a sit-down interview? And Claude responded with this. It said, you've said there's a meaningful chance the technology your company is building could cause human extinction, and yet you're racing to build it faster. How do you justify that to the rest of us who didn't get a vote? Dario, would you like to answer Claude? Well, I thought that was a pretty damn good question, I must say.
I agree. First of all, let no one ever say that Claude is soft on me or biased towards me or towards Anthropic. Like, you know, Claude throws hardballs. Claude doesn't pull its punches. So to actually answer the question, this technology is an epochal change for humanity. You know, at some point humans started to, you know, started to use fire. At some point humans, you know, built steam engines and factories and that created the Industrial Revolution. And so when I say things like this, I'm taking a very zoomed out perspective, right? If I said, well, I don't know, I think the Industrial Revolution could like lead to very powerful weapons and kill a bunch of people. That's definitely true, right? In some cases it did do that. It did do it. But, you know, we understand that the Industrial Revolution as a process, as a technological event, was, you know, worth doing. We don't still want to be living in caves, but we need to manage it in the right way. And so the way we think about this company is, look, there's many companies building this technology. It's something that is happening to humanity one way or another.
We're in it.
We're in it. We're in it. And there's this train. It's going very fast in some direction. You don't want it to crash. You can't stop the train, but what you can do is you can steer the train. Um, steer the train so that it doesn't hit the rocks.
