The billionaire who can’t stop writing essays that freak out the world

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan is credited with saying. Silicon Valley disagrees. Ever since the drama around artificial intelligence began heating up, technologists have unleashed bushels of commentary.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote 6500 words about how people who use a lot of AI will survive best in the AI world to come. Bill Gates spent nearly 6000 words arguing that AI will be humanity’s undoing unless we reorient human society and behaviour around it. Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose San Francisco house was attacked, needed only 1000 words to stress that “the world deserves huge amounts of AI and we must figure out how to make it happen”.

Billionaire Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the CEO of Anthropic, is one of the tech industry’s most prolific and polished explainers. He has contributed to dozens of scholarly papers and more recently wrote a half-dozen informal essays for the general public. Outside of a few references to such cultural artefacts as The Lord of the Rings , Carl Sagan and 2001: A Space Odyssey , these essays are generally measured, colourless, equipped with footnotes — an engineer’s reflections. The most recent was last Saturday.

Putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs is an old-fashioned thing to do, particularly when the topic being explained is a technology so amazing it might as well be magic. But as Anthropic moves ahead with what may be the largest public offering in history as soon as this fall, Amodei needs to forcefully reassure everyone that everything is on track. He’s losing if he’s not explaining.

His collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified. It’s not an easy task, convincing the world that something is a slam-dunk even though it will make Silicon Valley richer and more powerful while possibly leaving ordinary folks unemployed or — who knows? — dead.

Amodei’s own explanations have changed with the political weather. In January, he wrote in a 20,000-word essay, The Adolescence of Technology , about his wariness of regulations, saying they backfire and quickly become out of date.

Even worse: “They can potentially destroy economic value or coerce unwilling actors who are sceptical of these risks (and there is some chance they are right!).”

But in June, after the Trump administration asked AI companies to voluntarily submit new models for approval, Amodei said he was “grateful”. New AI products were like airplanes, he wrote in a new essay: “Their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.”

Last week, the AI disaster narrative again seized the upper hand. Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, quit with the dire public warning that Anthropic and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives”.

Amodei responded with a 3800-word essay, We Must Pace the Frontier.