Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the way for AI to win over the public is to 'actually' cure cancer

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the AI industry needs to make major scientific breakthroughs to improve the public's opinion of AI.

Bloomberg/Getty Images Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says negative public perception of AI is a "big problem." Amodei said AI companies have overpromised and undersold on what the technology can do.

He said the best way to earn the public's trust is for AI to deliver major scientific advancements.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the best way to win over AI skeptics is to deliver on the hype.

In a rare post on X on Saturday, Anthropic's CEO acknowledged the public's mistrust of AI and said the industry can only change that by delivering tangible scientific breakthroughs.

"At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive," Amodei wrote.

"The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world." "The thing that will work is actually curing cancer," he added.

The AI industry is facing a growing public backlash as it builds huge data centers in communities across the country, scrapes often copyrighted online data to train its models, and upends the workforce for many industries.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that about half of Americans felt the increased prevalence of AI in their daily lives made them feel "more concerned than excited." Amodei, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned on podcasts, in essays, and in Anthropic blog posts, about the dangers posed by AI's rapid development.

In a June essay, Amodei wrote that the company's new Mythos models present "very real risks" to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security.

Last year, he warned that AI would cause half of all entry-level jobs to vanish .

Some other AI leaders have criticized the kind of rhetoric for which Amodei, who left OpenAI in 2020 over concerns about the company's attention to safety, has become famous.

Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said earlier this year that his peers had been "way too certain" about their dire predictions and encouraged them to dial it back.

As OpenAI and Anthropic gear up for expected IPOs, they have followed that advice, pivoting from doomerism to boomerism .