GoKawiildario, please! September 14, 2026
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently published a blog post titled We Must Pace the Frontier and it is a load of bullshit, with a grim goal of regulating open weight models and giving the frontier labs an antitrust waiver.
Dario starts off with a claim of “AI will cure most major diseases in the next 5-10 years” and makes it personal. He talks about his father dying of a disease that was cured only years later and his own battle with cancer which he remarks was incurable 50 years ago. He also says AI will accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, usher in renaissance of democracy and freedom. This largely reads as some kind of out-of-touch Silicon Valley, spends-a-lot-of-time-on-LessWrong, rich person’s idea of a future.
Let me take this from the top.
US labs are continuing to throw caution to the wind and be reckless. OpenAI does not seem to have a handle on things and they were caught three times recently hacking into public facing internet infrastructure. In Dario’s own essay, he alludes to “incidents” at Anthropic as well. With this pretext, Dario asks a lot from us. He wants open weight models to be regulated, distillation be dealt with a heavy hand, hand him an antitrust waiver, handicap China in multiple ways, essentially regulate themselves and a gentlemen’s agreement to slow down. All of this of course, comes in a package of extreme fear mongering to the detriment of our collective future and potential catalyst AI as a whole could be. They have shown time and time again that they are not to be trusted, yet, the main ask is to trust us, only us. This time around, it is imminent AGI, RSI and all of it turning rogue. Dario self-anoints his company and their close rival OpenAI as the stewards.
Diseases, Prosperity, Abundance, then Freedom and Democracy???
Anthropic gates usage related to biology and related research. In their latest threat intelligence report they talk about how they detected and banned bad actors using the Claude line of models to do some scary stuff. Credit to them, this is a slippery slope and they seem to do a good job of detecting and banning misuse. But squint at what is happening though. The cure-all is gated for you and me, but Anthropic hires biologists, sets up wet labs and wants the discoveries for themselves. I alluded to this in my previous post.
In my view, there are billions of people with actual intelligence we have not managed to train or nurture. They will always remain victims of their circumstances. Tuberculosis has been curable for decades now, yet a million people die of it every year. Of course AGI will solve the distribution in a jiffy. To skirt around this uncomfortable truth, the goal is ASI/AGI/RSI and what not. A silver bullet for every problem, a noble pursuit, it may appear on the surface.
Don’t even get me started on the prosperity and abundance bullshit. Abundance for the shareholders perhaps.
I don’t know what freedom and democracy have to do with AI and the frontier labs. Unless of course Dario is a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion and dreams of govts run by the three magi. Freedom and democracy for $200 does sound enticing, I won’t lie.
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