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?”
