Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has published an essay – We Must Pace The Frontier – in which he writes:
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.
But – and there is always a but –
…like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious.
Those risks include, according to some, the complete destruction of the human race.
See, e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky confidently asserting today that if we do not institute immediate global techno-communism, instituting draconian government control over speech and publication of a type never before seen in any Western society, we are all going to die:
There are currently zero things more important than "don't die to AI" becoming a bipartisan project rather than a Democrat-polarized issue. If you have any political capital you can spend on this, do it now, I beg of you. Life or death. — Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) September 13, 2026
There is no evidence that this will happen. Some proponents of regulation tell us that the only response is the most extreme response available: total state control. There is no evidence that this response is correct, either. Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.
History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies.
This notwithstanding, to address this risk, Amodei proposes
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