To the extent that the midterms were a referendum on artificial intelligence (AI), Dario Amodei should take the results personally. The Anthropic CEO has become the face of an industry with extraordinary potential—and of the creepy, apocalyptic messaging that makes Americans distrust it.
AI was not the focal point of the election. But the industry risks drawing exactly the wrong lesson from public skepticism: that Americans are rejecting the technology itself.
There is a difference between opposing AI and distrusting the people who insist it could destroy humanity while racing to sell it to you. Some of the industry’s most prominent executives seem determined to erase that distinction, serving up own-goals against their own interests.
Chief among them is Amodei, the founder and CEO of Anthropic, which is set to go public in the coming weeks.
Amodei has become the face of AI doomerism while simultaneously leading the company through a potential multi-trillion-dollar IPO. Make that make sense. He is on the frontier of building critical software, while simultaneously panicking the masses with frightening sentiments about the very product he is advancing. The electorate has interpreted this very bluntly and rationally. An honest observer may be led to ask, “Perhaps we should be afraid of this stuff and turn it off?”
I am unapologetically pro-AI, but that has come from dedicating lots of time and energy to understanding the positive implications of innovation. When these companies build products and services that help to amplify human productivity and prosperity, they should be applauded. But they’ve become a hard team to root for.
The constant doomer signaling is becoming insufferable. Virtually every week, you’ll see major AI executives going on prime-time television and whining about their own technology. Yet the second the TV hit ends, they go back to racing to develop and commercialize the technology. The schizophrenic nature of AI messaging and actions from these Bay Area tech bros like Amodei has led to a deep level of distrust across the ideological spectrum.
Instead of deploying effective and truthful rhetoric to build public confidence, they are fomenting an obvious credibility problem with the American people. If AI dangers are truly grave, why do they keep building? If the truth is that you believe only you can be trusted to build these systems, then tell that to the American people and be straightforward with them.
Recent reports show that Anthropic has built a scientific laboratory for advanced biological experiments in the San Francisco Bay Area. This should come as a shock to those who read and watch the statements of Anthropic executives, who are repeatedly emphasizing potential biological catastrophe via AI, and here they are, opening a wet lab in a major urban area.
The broader polling of AI sentiment shows an industry in the throes of a credibility crisis. A Gallup survey in July found that only 27 percent of Americans trusted businesses to use AI technology responsibly. And a whopping 79 percent expected AI to reduce American jobs over the next decade. Those numbers should be a warning to executives who keep giving the public reasons to fear their products.
After the midterms, I hope that the AI industry wakes up and stops deploying more rounds of apocalyptic talking points in the name of safetyism. It’s not good for public confidence, and it’s not good for America.
It’s important to take AI unknowns seriously, especially when you are releasing powerful and consequential products to the public that may be granted access to sensitive data. In the right settings, it’s important to address those specific problems and find ways to innovate through engineering solutions. But it’s so fundamentally antagonistic to the American spirit when Amodei and his colleagues frame innovation as a terrifying process akin to the sentiments coming out of some regulatory bureaucracy in Europe.
Dario Amodei is not an elected official, and he’s never asked to be one. He runs an incredibly influential AI company. And whether he likes it or not, he has become the face of an entire industry. He needs to stop making the case against it. AI has the potential to contribute immensely to American prosperity and humanity more broadly. Its most prominent spokesmen should speak to the upside of this technology, not behave as though building it is a privilege reserved for a handful of people who know better than the rest of us.
Contrary to what you’re seeing on X, there is no mandate to detonate data centers and shut down AI. To the extent that the election offered a verdict on the industry, its executives should take it as a warning about the brand of AI they are selling—not the technology’s potential.
Americans didn’t vote against AI. They voted against Dario’s creepy brand of it.
Originally published at American Greatness
He is a typical old fashioned rent seeker pushing fear porn
Seems to me that it was Israel and not AI that was on the ballot.