AI needs a new story, a bigger narrative that touches people's hearts and minds. To help tell this new story, there is no one better than Daniela Amodei. Daniela, thank you so much for being with us at Think Health. Think Health is of course founded by Alice Walton, who famously brought the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to the Heartland, who built a medical school and a Whole Health Institute and is passionate about the use of AI to improve health. You are of course at the forefront of frontier models, but also you studied literature, you played the flute, you're a mom. You don't just speak tech. You speak about nature and friendship and self-reflection. So we really look forward to exploring these deeper questions together. Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here.
So let's start with this moment we are in. Right now, the AI conversation has focused so much on all the risks and the backlash against AI – 75% of people being fearful or anxious – and not so much on the benefits. And of course the anxiety is real about jobs, about safety, but do you think also that this anxiety is a proxy for something larger, the fact that suddenly we are going to be not the most intelligent thing on the planet? Is this anxiety about meaning and not just economics? What do you think about that larger existential moment?
This question is so important because my view of what is sort of happening in this moment is many people are starting to experience both the power of artificial intelligence and are also collectively really starting to think about what are some of the risks. And Anthropic is a little bit unusual because really from our inception, we have had this desire to be very open about both. One of our core cultural values is to hold light and shade, and we think there are real risks that we need to mitigate in order to be able to get to all of the incredible and positive benefits that we think AI will bring about. I think a great example: an organization called OpenEvidence uses Claude to help doctors be able to access all of the medical literature in the world. So whether you're a doctor operating in Cleveland or in Ghana, whether you're in a city or in a rural village, you're able to access the entire scope of human knowledge and innovation about whatever medical challenge your patient is facing.
To come to you, you have been very unusual among AI leaders in speaking a lot about wanting to be self-reflective, about learning from mistakes, about nature, about friendship. And that's kind of unusual because in our social media ecosystem, we are kind of prevented from that self-reflection. It's so easy to spend our lives doom-scrolling or losing ourselves in the rabbit hole of social media. So how can we help people nurture that part that wants to be self-reflective, that wants to reconnect with themselves and what really matters? And can AI, with its power of hyper-personalization, help with that?
This is such an important and a very astute question. My personal view is that we're kind of coming off the back of this time in history where technology in the social media age has largely been used to disintermediate humans from one another. Instead of you and I going to have an iced coffee together in person, we're messaging on Snapchat or Instagram. Instead of people going and forming communities in person with the people that live in their neighborhood, they're writing angry comments. What it's led to is a warranted skepticism from people that technology can be used to bring us closer together, because I believe that was the promise that was kind of made by these technology companies.
That essentially broke those promises. Exactly. At the same time, the way that I think about AI is quite different. AI is not a social mechanism. There are some applications of AI that we think are quite bad, like making AI girlfriends or boyfriends. I think that's a terrible use of AI, and people should not do it. And the reason that I think that is because it is another step further down the road of disintermediation, of humans being further from one another. A much better world of AI is one in which artificial intelligence is doing a lot of the things that are isolating or lonely activities for humans. They are making us more productive. They're doing work that an AI can do that a human doesn't have to do, so that we can spend more time together. So that a doctor, instead of spending 10 hours, 15 hours researching what is happening with this patient, I actually have access at my fingertips via Claude and OpenEvidence to say what is happening to this patient, so that I can actually spend more time relating to them as a human. But you can also imagine that socially, it would probably be a better world if we were spending less time interacting with technology and more time interacting with each other.
And also connecting with ourselves, because I studied comparative religion in India, and what amazed me is how every spiritual tradition, every religious tradition, in the end says the same thing: that we all have this place of wisdom, peace and strength in us. But our current world makes it very hard to reconnect with it. Thich Nhat Hanh said, "It's never been easier to run away from ourselves." So how can AI be used to help us reclaim time? As you said, a lot of people are saving time by using AI that makes them more productive, and then using that time to do the same things they were doing before. So there has to be a process of educating ourselves, nurturing that part that we all have in us to reconnect with something deeper, both within ourselves and with each other.
This is so, so accurate. And not to overly pick on the social media companies, but in addition to disintermediating us from one another, it has also in some ways disintermediated us from ourselves. That's also time that could be spent in nature, with animals, in self-reflection, taking on passion projects. Some of the use cases of Claude and artificial intelligence is the possibility for it to spark creativity, curiosity and joy in people. We were talking before about how we both love Greek mythology. Talking to Claude, it's a tool for me to also explore what it is that brings me value and meaning.
And so I ask Claude to help me pursue many of my passions, either by giving me more information – so that could be recommending things – by actually helping me create projects that are valuable to me, even if they're not for productive work reasons.
And you've said that in a world where AI is every day becoming more and more capable, the uniquely human qualities are going to become more and more important. So what do you think are some of these uniquely human qualities, and how can we nurture them in each other and in ourselves?
My belief is humans are genuinely curious. We have a sort of instinctive desire to want to learn, to be creative, to be curious.
To grow, to develop, to be the best versions of ourselves, and help other people be the best version of themselves in kind of the purest form. If we're able to get through the challenges, my sense is that on the kind of other side is this world in which human skills are the main thing that's left. In the future we might optimize for doctors who have a great bedside manner, who care about you personally, who show that they care. And there's so much interesting research that shows that clinical outcomes are better when you have a good personal relationship with your doctor. That's just one example. If you imagine teachers who are not spending quite as much time developing curriculum and looking at all of the logistics and administrative duties that come with being in a school, maybe they're actually able to spend more time with kids. I met a woman recently who told me she runs a moms group for moms who use AI. The way she put it was, "We carry the majority of the mental load in a family." And just our ability to take some of that mental load and give it to Claude enables us to be able to spend more time with our families, to spend more time with ourselves, to spend more time with our friends, pick up passion projects, be curious about things again. And again, to me, this is a world that we all get to choose to build together. This is something that everyone has a right to participate in and say, "How do we want to not feel like this technology is happening to us, but that we're able to kind of take it by the reins and say, how can we use this to make it work better for ourselves, for other people, for our society?"
So I love how your whole life before Anthropic brought you to these realizations, because before Stripe, before OpenAI, before any of this, you were a classical flutist on a scholarship. I love that because the music demands something so different from us – just practicing for hours for a performance that's not going to be rushed, and that's in the service of something beautiful rather than something useful. So what did you learn from playing the flute that has helped you in being the president of Anthropic?
A lot of the themes that we've been talking about are quite resonant with this. I personally loved the structure and discipline of practicing. I've always been someone who likes to work hard, but the ability to work hard at something and have it be a creative and meaningful and sort of cup-filling outcome – it's a very special privilege to be able to work hard at something and feel fulfilled from it. And I first got a sense of what that felt like from music. The second is that the part I enjoyed the most was playing with other people. In college and even before college, I did a lot of chamber music and I played in an orchestra. Part of what was so exciting about that – it sounds almost a little bit trite – but you're so much greater than the sum of your parts, right? You have every different instrument that has its own special role. Everybody has the moment where they're in the spotlight and the moment when they're in the background, the moment when they're supporting another instrument and the moment when they're taking center stage. And I actually think about that a lot in how we build teams at Anthropic and how we work together, and get to sort of be the conductor. There's a particular experience, especially when you're on stage with many other people, where you can viscerally feel this emotion that you're part of something bigger than just you. I still love to go to the symphony. There's something about the experience of sitting in a theater and hearing people – this moment will never happen again. That touches something very deep and human in you.
I just love how extraordinary life is. Who could have predicted that somebody goes from being a flutist in an orchestra to having everybody report to her in the biggest AI company in the world? But you already mentioned what is actually my favorite Anthropic value, which is holding light and shade. This is so key because it's not just true about AI, it's true about all of us. We are all a mixture of better angels and lesser angels. So we are now at this historic moment when we talk about how AI can be constantly improving, but what can we do to also nurture our better angels? What can we do as a culture, and what can AI do?
This is actually advice that I give to the company a lot. And something I tell people is just my belief in the importance of balance in life. I love my job. I work really hard, and I'm also a mom. I have a five-year-old and a one-year-old, and they are on their own schedule that is totally unrelated to my job. To me, the best version of life is one in which humans get to experience a lot of different facets of life that help them, like you've said, self-reflect on who they are, build community with other people, be curious and creative in ways that are meaningful and spark joy for them. Something I tell the organization is time off and rest is really important. So many decades of psychology research and anthropological research seem to indicate that there's a few core things that help humans feel like the best versions of ourselves, right? One is adequate time to spend with the people you love – your family, your children, your friends, your partner, anybody that's meaningful to you. Like you've said, time with yourself, reflection time, whether that's for many people religion, spirituality, time in nature, time feeling like you're connecting to something that's bigger than you. Work and meaning is another major area that often is self-reflective for people. And being embodied, the ability to be able to spend time in nature, walking, exercise – these are reasonably well documented as things that help people feel like the best versions of themselves in some form. And what's interesting, we were talking about this with social media – it really cuts against almost each one of those things. It sort of gives us the sort of cotton candy version of connection, right? It tastes really sweet for a minute, but it's not actually filling. My hope again is that AI – there's a possibility that we could reverse some of that trend. Spend time with the people you love in person, spend time in nature, spend time connecting to something bigger than yourself. This is a decision. We all get to decide if this is the type of world that we want to build.
But also, as you have said, companies have to decide. I mean, you made some very key decisions, like you are not allowing ads, because ads require engagement, and the easiest way to engage people is by activating their rage and their anger – their lesser angels. So these are also very important company decisions. But you've also said, when asked about what's the good life, as Greek philosophers always asked each other, and you said it's really how do we become the best version of ourselves? But at the moment, we seem to be placing all our bets, Daniela, on the machines getting better and better and better. It's as though we are like – human beings are static and stagnant, and machines are these amazing creatures that have recursive self-improvement. But we all know from science and from spiritual traditions that human beings also have recursive self-improvement. You've kind of alluded to it many times when you said we're curious, we want to learn, we want to grow. I really believe that this instinct to evolve is a real instinct. I actually wrote a book many years ago – don't worry, only three people have read it – called The Fourth Instinct, about our instinct beyond survival, sex and status, power – our instinct to evolve, to find meaning in life. And I just wonder, how can we open up the conversation to include recursive self-improvement for humans?
Yes. I absolutely love that question. To me there's almost three phases of it. The first phase is – it's almost like a base-of-the-pyramid principle, which is we can't be in a position where we're turning that impulse off – which again is sort of my worry about the current sort of mode of communication of technology through social media. You sort of alluded to this no-ads commitment from Anthropic, this idea that if you structure AI products the same way that you structured the last generation of products, you will wind up with the same results. And I actually think it's worse because AI is so personal.
And so much more powerful.
So much more powerful, so much more personal, that ads targeted at sensitive health data or emotional conversations – people have emotional conversations sometimes with AI – it feels disrespectful to people to advertise to them based on the kind of content that they're putting into these tools. And maybe even more importantly, just to your point, the incentives that it sets up is to keep you on the platform, to keep you engaged, to keep you frustrated, and to keep you on a screen, away from humans, away from connecting. And if we do things that way, everyone is really going to regret it. Does Claude end a conversation with you when you've gotten the information that you need? That base layer we absolutely have to do. The second is if the technology is doing its job the way it should be, how do we reclaim time and space to have the ability for people to recursively self-improve? This idea that humans will have more time for each other, for themselves – that to me is the second layer that sort of gives people agency and time to be curious, to self-reflect, to be better versions of themselves. The third, the very top of the pyramid in my mind, is how can we actually leverage these tools to drive people's curiosity? The idea of – oh, you're really interested in creating this art project, let me help work with you on how you and your friend are going to do that. How do you actually get the permitting to be able to do this in a public space? Let's do the application so that you can actually build this mosaic in your town square that you've been wanting to do for 20 years with your best friend. The first two layers have to be there, but there's a role for AI at the top as well.
