Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a walking contradiction. He genuinely believes AI could destroy the world — and yet he co-founded one of the most aggressive frontier AI companies in the industry.
Back in his OpenAI days, he was already a little out there. Sensitive memos never went on Google Docs. Instead, he'd draft them at home on a computer with zero internet access, print them out, and distribute them to colleagues in person. Some people say he even avoided trips to China because he was afraid of being kidnapped.
Before GPT-3 had even started training, he worried it was already approaching AGI. The safety team he led at the time consequently asked Microsoft to…