Anthropic CEO Says He’s Not an AI Pessimist

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is disputing arguments he’s overly pessimistic about artificial intelligence’s impact.

As TechCrunch reported Sunday (Aug. 16), Amodei made these claims in response to comments from investor Gavin Baker, who contended in a post on X and on the “All In” podcast that the executive’s warnings about AI-related risks have helped drive a backlash to the technology.

Claiming that Amodei has “lost the argument” on AI regulation and considering that “he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world,” Baker wrote, “I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry.”

Amodei wrote his own post, disputing the idea that his “messaging has been disproportionately negative” but has rather been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits.”

He added that he wrote his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” because he “didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how technology could radically transform the world for the better.”

While Amodei acknowledged that the public has a negative view of AI, calling it “a big problem,” he disagreed that this negativity resulted from warnings by he and other AI executives about possible risks.

“I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei said. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”

In terms of regulation, Amodei argued that Baker was presenting “a false choice” between distributing AI widely with no regulation, or leaving the technology in the hands of a few companies using regulation.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week the debut of Fairground AI Creator TV, the first free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel built entirely from AI content.

The early reviews have been harsh — Futurism called Fairground an “AI slop channel” broadcasting “abominations” — but that may be beside the point, the report said, as its economics depend on filling enough hours with content cheap enough to produce that even modest ad rates against a large volume of inventory generate a profit.

“AI production removes almost all of the marginal cost of adding another hour of programming, because generating a new episode does not require hiring a cast, renting a set or paying a production crew the way conventional television does,” the report said.