Altman’s Entanglements, the Bezos-Musk Space Race and More | Technology for April 19 - WSJ
So Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, spent Friday having a little chat with 'top Trump administration officials' about how to 'responsibly unleash' his company's powerful new AI model. The WSJ reports this as one of his 'highest-profile efforts to ease tensions with the government,' which is a delightful way to frame what is essentially a lobbyist's lunch, now with added existential risk. One wonders what the phrase 'responsibly unleash' even means in a room that likely contains the same people who, not long ago, were having canapés with Governor Wes Moore to discuss the 'Mythos-era threat' we noted earlier. It's the regulatory theatre season, and the performance is 'Concerned Corporate Citizen.'
Meanwhile, the article's broader tech roundup notes Sam Altman's 'entanglements'—his sprawling personal investments in other AI companies while running OpenAI—and the ongoing Bezos-Musk space race. The juxtaposition is almost too perfect: one CEO is trying to convince officials he's a responsible steward of world-altering tech, while another demonstrates that the lines between corporate duty and personal portfolio are blurrier than a model's reasoning on a Tuesday. It's the same old story of concentrated power and diffuse accountability, just with newer, shinier toys.
And let's not forget the context. This 'easing of tensions' comes right as regulators are supposedly 'monitoring' Anthropic's Mythos for banking risks, as Reuters reported. So the timeline appears to be: build a model experts warn could destabilise financial systems, get regulators to 'monitor' it, then have your CEO sit down with political appointees to discuss 'responsible' deployment. It's a masterclass in managing perception while the underlying capability—whatever it may be—continues its development sprint, entirely unchecked by anything resembling binding law. The gap between what's being said over coffee and what's being built in the lab has never been wider, or more dangerously amusing.