Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is on a public-relations blitz to whitewash his own advocacy in the AI space amid growing backlash. Watching it unfold conjures up the famous Shaggy song, “It Wasn’t Me.”
Much like the philandering character in the iconic hit, who was caught “red-handed creepin’ with the girl next door,” Amodei now expects the public to ignore what they have seen and heard from him regarding his doomerist vision of artificial intelligence — and his related demands for government to regulate his competitors.
Amodei recently attempted to deny this record in a post on X, saying, ” I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits.”
President Donald Trump’s former AI czar, David Sacks, corrected the record on a recent episode of the All-In podcast:
“Do you expect us to have amnesia about the fact that just about a year and a half ago, you said, very specifically, that within one to five years, 50% of entry-level knowledge workers would lose their jobs. And this was not just some sort of idle speculation. … This was something that they engineered and amplified into a full-fledged media campaign.”
Sacks further noted that we are now past the one-year mark, and we’ve only seen “net job creation.”
It’s not unusual for major technological change to cause widespread fears of job displacement and societal disruption. It has happened every time there was a technological leap for thousands of years. But Amodei is unique in world history in that he is both the CEO of a company bringing about a major technological leap and, at the same time, a prophet of doom who, just last year, was promising his own technology would cause mass unemployment and societal destruction.
It is far more likely that AI will lead to soaring prosperity (which we will one day look back at as an industrial revolution of sorts) and the development of new drugs and cures for diseases that have caused human suffering since the beginning of time (a new, AI-developed skin cancer drug is already on trial).
Our leadership in this space is vital to national defense, and one should simply dismiss Amodei for perhaps no reason other than why would he — or the federal regulators he courts — have all the answers on how best to keep AI safe?
Amodei certainly wants you to believe he does. Part of his solution for the past couple of years has been to regulate his competitors, particularly open-weight models, which have rapidly caught up to his own closed-source frontier platform. He is still pushing for a federal regulatory apparatus for AI, but he is recalibrating his doomsaying to ensure it only hobbles his competitors.
Sacks dismissed Amodei’s regulatory dreams, quipping, “We should not have a DMV for AI.”
Given the recent, more negative turn in public sentiment, we now find ourselves at something of an inflection point in the AI race.
The Trump administration, which began its term promoting a light-touch regulatory framework for AI and hiring “the best people” such as Sacks to ensure it would be so, has recently shown signs of wobbling by delaying the release of new frontier AI models, and flirting with the idea of nationalizing these companies via some kind of partial government ownership structure.
Particularly as it comes to delaying the release of frontier models, Amodei’s fingerprints are all over the decision.
Let’s remember that it was his “Mythos” Anthropic model that first led to this form of federal intervention — after he marketed it as “too dangerous for release.”
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While Anthropic is peddling fear to kneecap its competitors and pump up hype ahead of a likely IPO, the more people fear AI, the greater the risk that America loses the race to superintelligence.
The character in Shaggy’s song eventually comes around, apologizes, and promises to actually change. Amodei needs to do the same by taking responsibility for his shameless doomsaying and giving up on using the government to hobble his rivals.
Jon Decker is executive director of American Commitment and a senior fellow at the Parkview Institute.