Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’

Ah, marvellous. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has diagnosed the public's growing hatred of artificial intelligence as 'fundamentally a crisis of trust' — which is a bit like an arsonist announcing that the real problem with fires is a shortage of fire extinguishers. He insists that AI leaders' apocalyptic warnings are not the main cause, calling the backlash 'the latest iteration' of a decades-long crisis. Right, because nothing says 'trustworthy' like a man building superintelligence while assuring us it won't kill us. One might note that 'crisis of trust' is an odd phrase for an industry whose entire business model depends on the public handing over their data and their judgement.

One can only admire the ontological flexibility on display. When OpenAI's Sam Altman warns about AI risk, the industry calls him a doomer; when Amodei warns, the public is apparently supposed to trust him more, yet has the audacity to be sceptical of the very people who told them the technology might end civilisation. Amodei's response to the trust deficit is essentially to say: 'Don't look at us, this is just history repeating itself.' But he is right about one thing: trust is indeed the issue, which makes it all the stranger that his solution is to tell the public they've got it all wrong. The real crisis, one assumes, is that the public keeps failing to distinguish between different billionaires selling the same existential dread.

This all dovetails rather neatly with the recent finding that young adults don't trust a single AI CEO. If the backlash is a crisis of trust, as Amodei says, then the industry is the author of that crisis — but apparently acknowledging that would be too simple. Instead we get a shrug and a reminder that mistrust is timeless, like the class clown blaming the school curriculum. Perhaps next he'll tell us that the crisis is really about a decline in handwriting. Cheers, Dario — the pint's on us, though perhaps not for long, once the machines take over the brewery.