Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is 'fundamentally a crisis of trust'

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed back this week against the idea that he’s been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI, after investor Gavin Baker argued — on the All-In podcast and on X — that Amodei’s warnings about AI’s dangers have helped fuel backlash in the U.S., particularly against data centers. Baker said Amodei has “lost the argument” on AI regulation and that, given he’s about to lead “one of the most important companies in the world,” he should try to be “a more positive advocate for his own industry.”

In a series of posts, Amodei disagreed that his messaging has been disproportionately negative, saying his writing has been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits” and that he wrote his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” because he felt the AI industry wasn’t painting an inspiring enough picture of the technology’s potential. He did agree that “the public has a negative view of AI” and called that “a big problem” — but rejected the idea that AI leaders’ warnings are the primary cause. “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.”

Amodei argued that the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that they haven’t yet delivered on their promises to benefit the world — not their public messaging. On regulation, he pushed back on Baker’s framing of a choice between distributing AI without rules or letting regulation concentrate power among a few companies, saying Anthropic designs its policy proposals specifically to slow down frontier AI companies while giving smaller competitors room to compete, since he sees AI as a technology that structurally tends to concentrate power regardless.

Why it matters

The exchange captures a live rift inside the AI industry over how to talk about its own risks — and whether candor about AI’s dangers helps or hurts the industry’s case against tighter regulation.