Dario Amodei fires back at rumor Anthropic will be the “only company”

Investor Gavin Baker dropped a bombshell on the All-In Podcast: multiple people he trusts told him Dario Amodei once said Anthropic could become “the world’s only private company.” Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas wasn’t having it, calling the claim “completely false” and saying Baker’s sources are lying.

Baker accepted the clarification, but he kept pushing. He says the rumor caught on because it sounds exactly like Dario’s long-held public position: AI is dangerous, power could become highly concentrated, and therefore we need regulation. Baker’s view is the opposite — the more dangerous AI gets, the more we should spread capabilities out, not hand them to a handful of companies and governments.

Today, Dario responded directly. His argument: AI is naturally going to concentrate among a few giants anyway, thanks to chips, compute, and economies of scale. Open-weight models just put models in more people’s hands; they don’t solve the question of who has the resources to train the most powerful models. So his answer is regulation — aimed at the strongest players. Run frontier models through rigorous testing, go easier on small companies and laggards. Open weights can stay, but once their capabilities approach the frontier, test them too. Baker worries regulation will create concentration; Dario thinks regulation is precisely what counteracts it.

He also addressed Baker’s broader criticism that he talks about AI risk too much. Dario’s take: the public doesn’t distrust AI companies because the industry talks too much about risk. It distrusts them because the industry promises too much and delivers too little. Hyping “AI can cure cancer” doesn’t help. Actually curing cancer does. Anthropic is doubling down on biology and medicine, and hopes to show some early results in the coming months.