Anthropic's chief executive says the public's problem with AI is not his warnings — it is that people no longer trust anyone
On 15 August Dario Amodei replied on X to the investor Gavin Baker, who had argued that Amodei's public warnings about AI risk were feeding the backlash against the industry. Amodei's answer was that the backlash is 'fundamentally a crisis of trust' built up over decades: ordinary people do not trust companies, governments or the technology industry, and 'always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over'. He said the fairest criticism of AI companies, his own included, is that they have not yet delivered on their promises to benefit the world, and pointed to actually curing cancer as the kind of result that would change minds rather than better messaging. On regulation he pushed back on the reflex that rules automatically mean regulatory capture, arguing they can be designed to slow the frontier labs without disadvantaging smaller competitors or open-weight models — and he backed rules of the road covering cybersecurity, biological risk and alignment.
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