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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei apparently can’t believe that not everyone at the company is as noble-minded as he is.
According to new reporting from Axios, which cites a source familiar with the matter, Amodei is concerned that the new hires at the $965 billion AI firm are joining for the money instead of its greater mission.
Shocker, right? Anthropic pays some of the best salaries in the business, and now Amodei fears it’s becoming a victim of its own success. Being the most valuable AI firm in the world sure sounds tough.
But it’s also a sentiment tinged with irony. Anthropic’s professed mission is to safely build advanced AI systems. When Amodei left OpenAI to pursue this goal, part of his gripe with his old company was that it was getting too commercial by partnering with Microsoft.
Now, seemingly contrary to this “safety-first” mission, Anthropic has been moving to take itself public in an anticipated trillion-dollar IPO. This would rake in untold billions of dollars for the company — and all but ensure that its lofty, moral duty would forever be subjugated the money-making whims of Wall Street.
Other controversies have underscored the dubiousness of Anthropic’s commitment to its mission and the hypocrisy of its goodie-two-shoes act. Earlier this year, it dropped a critical safety pledge to stop training an AI model if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And despite making a show of clashing with the Pentagon over concerns about the safe deployment of its AI systems, Anthropic also let the military use its Claude AI to select targets in Iran.
Behind the scenes, it’s reportedly helping the US National Security Agency use its Mythos model, which Anthropic has emphasized is extremely dangerous, to wage cyberwarfare against China. It was also recently caught using hidden code to secretly spy on Chinese users of its products.
Let’s not forget that Amodei has promised that AI will wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs in the next few years. If he’s right, who can blame his new hires for joining the winning side and getting that bag while their jobs still exist?
More on Anthropic: A Whole Bunch of People’s Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There’s Some Wildly Private Stuff in There