Dario Amodei admits AI suffers from a crisis of trust, saying people worry companies or governments are ‘cooking up some new way to screw them over’

Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei pushed back on the notion that he’s responsible for the public’s overall sense of doom around AI, but acknowledged there are trust issues.

In a lengthy post on X on Saturday, which is unusual as he generally stays away from social media, he first addressed AI regulation, describing a false choice between those who argue it leads to regulatory capture and concentration of power versus those who think widely distributing AI, including via open models, is the best way to keep the technology in check.

Amodei pointed out that institutions like the court system can decentralize power, while noting Anthropic has been in favor of policies that slow down frontier AI companies and also give smaller rivals an advantage.

Still, he conceded that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power.

But that’s not because of regulation.

Instead, he attributed it to AI scaling laws, referring to how a model’s performance improves as resources used to build it increase.

Open-weight models are a bit better but merely shift the concentration of power to those with the most computing capacity and chips.

“By contrast I think the right ‘rules of the road’ can simultaneously (a) address AI’s cyber/bio/alignment risks, (b) institutionally constrain the power of the frontier AI companies, and (c) leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring,” Amodei wrote, adding that he supports creation of a FINRA-like entity and the Trump administration’s stance on AI testing.

Then he tackled his rhetoric about AI and denied that he has been overly negative, pointing to essays he’s written that equally present the technology’s risks and benefits.

Social media clips, however, often characterize his statements as excessively gloomy to get clicks, Amodei added.

To be sure, the Anthropic CEO famously predicted AI could wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs .

But more recently, he toned down the warning and called AI a multiplier of output, not a destroyer of jobs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similarly pivoted his messaging , as both companies head for IPOs.

In his X post, Amodei agreed that the public has a negative view of AI, which he considers a big problem, but didn’t place the blame on himself or any other individual AI executive.