If you're a major artificial intelligence company worth $183 billion, it might seem like bad business to reveal that in testing your AI models resorted to blackmail to avoid being shut down and in real life were recently used by Chinese hackers in a cyber attack on foreign governments. But those disclosures aren't unusual for Anthropic. CEO Dario Amodei has centered his company's brand around transparency and safety, which doesn't seem to have hurt its bottom line. 80% of Anthropic's revenue now comes from businesses. 300,000 of them use its AI models called Claude. Dario Amodei talks a lot about the potential dangers of AI and has repeatedly called for its regulation. But Amodei is also engaged in a multi-trillion dollar arms race, a cutthroat competition to develop a form of intelligence the world has never seen.
You believe it will be smarter than all humans?
I believe it will reach that level, that it will be smarter than most or all humans in most or all ways.
Do you worry about the unknowns here?
I worry a lot about the unknowns. I don't think we can predict everything for sure, but precisely because of that, we're trying to predict everything we can. We're thinking about the economic impacts of AI. We're thinking about the misuse. We're thinking about losing control of the model. But if you're trying to address these unknown threats with a very fast-moving technology, you got to call it as you see it, and you got to be willing to be wrong sometimes.
Inside its well-guarded San Francisco headquarters, Anthropic has some 60 research teams trying to identify those unknown threats and build safeguards to mitigate them. They also study how customers are putting Claude, their artificial intelligence, to work. Anthropic has found that Claude is not just helping users with tasks, it's increasingly completing them. The AI models which can reason and make decisions are powering customer service, analyzing complex medical research, and are now helping to write 90% of Anthropic's computer code.
You've said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next 1 to 5 years.
Yes, that is the future we could see if we don't become aware of this problem.
Half of all entry-level white collar jobs.
Well, if we look at entry-level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals, many of the white collar service industries, a lot of what they do, AI models are already quite good at. Without intervention, it's hard to imagine that there won't be some significant job impact there. And my worry is that it'll be broad and it'll be faster than what we've seen with previous technology.
Dario Amodei is 42 and previously oversaw research at what's now a competitor, OpenAI, working under its CEO, Sam Altman. He left along with six other employees, including his sister, Daniela, to start Anthropic in 2021. They say they wanted to take a different approach to developing safer artificial intelligence.
It is an experiment. I mean, nobody knows what the impact fully is going to be. I think it is an experiment. And one way to think about Anthropic is that it's a little bit trying to put bumpers or guardrails on that experiment. We do know that this is coming incredibly quickly. And I think the worst version of outcomes would be we knew there was going to be this incredible transformation, and people didn't have enough of an opportunity to adapt.
It's unusual for a technology company to talk so much about all of the things that could go wrong.
But it's so essential because if we don't, then you could end up in the world of the cigarette companies or the opioid companies where they knew there were dangers and they didn't talk about them and certainly did not prevent them.
Amodei does have plenty of critics in Silicon Valley who call him an AI alarmist.
Some people say about Anthropic that this is safety theater, that it's good branding. It's good for business. Why should people trust you?
Some of the things just can be verified now. They're not safety theater. They're actually things the model can do. For some of it, it will depend on the future and we're not always going to be right, but we're calling it as best we can.
Twice a month, he convenes his more than 2,000 employees for meetings known as Dario Vision Quest. A common theme, the extraordinary potential of AI to transform society for the better.
We have a growing team working on using Claude to make scientific discovery.
He thinks AI could help find cures for most cancers, prevent Alzheimer's, and even double the human lifespan.
That sounds unimaginable.
In a way, it sounds crazy, right? But here's the way I think about it. I use this phrase called the compressed 21st century. The idea would be at the point that we can get the AI systems to this level of power, where they're able to work with the best human scientists, could we get 10 times the rate of progress and therefore compress all the medical progress that was going to happen throughout the entire 21st century in 5 or 10 years.
But the more autonomous or capable artificial intelligence becomes, the more Amodei says there is to be concerned about.
One of the things that's been powerful in a positive way about the models is their ability to act on their own. But the more autonomy we give these systems, the more we can worry. Are they doing exactly the things that we want them to do?
To figure that out, Amodei relies on Logan Graham. He heads up what's called Anthropic's Frontier Red Team. Most major AI companies have them. The Red Team stress tests each new version of Claude to see what kind of damage it could help humans do.
What kind of things are you testing for?
The broad category is national security risk. Can this AI make a weapon of mass destruction? Specifically, we focus on CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. And right now, we're at the stage of figuring out, can these models help somebody make one of those? If the model can help make a biological weapon, for example, that's usually the same capabilities that the model could use to help make vaccines and accelerate therapeutics.
Graham also keeps a close eye on how much Claude is capable of doing on its own.
How much does autonomy concern you?
You want a model to go build your business and make you a billion dollars, but you don't want to wake up one day and find that it's also locked you out of the company, for example. And so our basic approach to it is we should just start measuring these autonomous capabilities, and to run as many weird experiments as possible and see what happens.
We got glimpses of those weird experiments in Anthropic's offices. In this one, they let Claude run their vending machines. They call it Claudius, and it's a test of AI's ability to one day operate a business on its own. Employees can message Claudius online.
So, this is a live feed of Claudius discussing with employees right now to order just about anything. Claudius then sources the products, negotiates the prices, and gets them delivered. So far, it hasn't made much money. It gives away too many discounts and like most AI it occasionally hallucinates. An employee decided to check on the status of its order and Claudius responded with something like, 'Well, you can come down to the eighth floor. You'll notice me. I'm wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.'
