Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a serious warning for fellow AI giants who ignore the public’s concerns about AI.
“We can’t just say we’re going to create all this wealth. A lot of it is going to go to us and we’re going to be trillionaires, and nobody’s going to complain about that,” Amodei said in an interview with Axios. “Look, if you don’t do it the right way, the mob will attack you.”
The announcement comes after Amodei published a massive 19,000-word essay on Monday called “Technology’s Adolescence,” in which he laid out his vision for the future of AI.
These include his belief that the technology will turn the heads of some tech companies into millionaires, and that humanity as a whole needs to treat AI like a “serious civilizational challenge.”
In both an interview and an essay, Amodei called for stronger tax policies to ensure a broader distribution of the “wealth” generated by AI.
“I don’t think this is the old tax system,” Amodei said in an interview. “This is for a world where people become trillionaires.”
Amodei said in his paper that the tax “could be general or targeted specifically at AI companies,” without going into details other than to say that not aggressively pursuing such a tax policy would result in inappropriate policy design.
He also said he advised lawmakers to support AI transparency legislation and cut off chip supplies to China, in addition to pursuing more progressive taxes.
Amodei stands out from other technology executives in that he is often seen as having a more “disastrous” view of AI. But he also says the public’s concerns about AI are not necessarily “targeted.”
Specifically, he argued that while data centers “don’t use that much water,” concerns about electricity bills are “understandable” but only part of the discussion.
“I think in the long run, it’s not a question of electricity prices, it’s a question of enormous wealth and whether they’re going to get some of that wealth,” Amodei said in an interview.
