David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wants a ‘DMV for AI.’ But plenty of industries thrive despite safety regulation

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI.

In this edition: OpenAI details two week training pause, more security controls following Hugging Face hack.

Anthropic on course for $65 billion in annual revenue.

OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for teens.

Can AI models figure out the rules of the game? I’m just back from three weeks of vacation.

Thanks to my colleagues Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini for holding down the fort here while I was away.

For much of that time, I was engaged in outdoor activities—camping, hiking, kayaking, fishing, running, and swimming—or indoor ones that are not digitally-mediated, such as dining out with family or listening to live entertainment.

Sure, my family and I did sometimes use Google Search to look stuff up, and the AI-summarized answers it provided were often impressively detailed and accurate.

It was definitely a lot more convenient than having to hunt for information across multiple web pages.

But that’s about where my interaction with AI started and stopped.

Overall, my three week break was a refreshing reminder of all the ways in which AI has not transformed society and, hopefully, never will.

The big AI news over the weekend was the debate over Dario Amodei’s lengthy post on X defending the company’s approach to both regulation and talking about AI’s many risks.

Amodei, who rarely appears on the Elon Musk-controlled social media platform, made the post in response to comments investor Gavin Baker made on the “All In” podcast, which is cohosted by former Trump AI czar David Sacks, himself no fan of Anthropic.

Baker said that he’d been told “by multiple people I trust” that Amodei had said that Anthropic was so confident of both AI’s potential and his company’s position at the forefront of AI development that “Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point.” Baker described this as evidence of Anthropic’s “maximalist” vision, in which only it and the U.S. government decided who could access super powerful AI.