Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s uneasy about how much power a handful of tech leaders — including himself — have over the future of artificial intelligence.
“I think I’m deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people,” Amodei told Anderson Cooper in a “60 Minutes” episode that aired Sunday.
“Like who elected you and Sam Altman?” asked Anderson.
“No one. Honestly, no one,” Amodei replied.
Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, has positioned his startup as one promoting safety and transparency — even when that means exposing the darker sides of its own technology.
In a controlled experiment released in June, Anthropic found that its AI model, Claude, attempted to blackmail a fictional executive in a lab test meant to probe how models respond when facing shutdown.
Last week, the company disclosed that Chinese nation-state hackers jailbroke its AI model, Claude, to automate a large-scale cyberattack against about 30 global targets, including government agencies and major corporations.
“Just to be clear, these are operations that we shut down and operations that we freely disclosed ourselves after we shut them down because AI is a new technology,” Amodei told Anderson. “Just like it’s going to go wrong on its own, it’s also going to be misused by criminals and malicious state actors.”
Opportunities and risks
Despite those dangers, Amodei believes AI will eventually become “smarter than most or all humans in most or all ways.”
He told “60 Minutes” it could help scientists find cures for cancer, prevent Alzheimer’s, and even double the human lifespan — what he calls a “compressed 21st century,” where a century’s worth of medical progress happens in just a decade.
However, he has also warned that the same technology could rapidly disrupt the labor market.
In May, he told Axios he believes AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level office jobs within five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%, and that industry and governments are “sugarcoating” what’s coming.
“If we look at entry-level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals — you know, many of the white-collar industries — a lot of what they do, AI models are already quite good at,” he told Anderson. “Without intervention, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some significant job impact there.”
“And my worry is that it’ll be broader and faster than what we’ve seen with previous technology,” he added.
Inside Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters, over 60 research teams are working to identify threats and develop safeguards. Amodei described the company as “trying to put bumpers or guardrails on the experiment.”
It’s “essential” to share these threats with the public, Amodei said, “because if we don’t, then you could end up in the world of the cigarette companies or the opioid companies, where they knew there were dangers and they didn’t talk about them and certainly did not prevent them.”
Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, Business Insider reported earlier this month, in a round that could value Amodei’s company at more than $350 billion.
