Dario Amodei

Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, filed Monday for what could be the largest stock offering in history. The company is expected to be valued at around $1.5 trillion, roughly eight times its worth a year ago. Investors are being offered an extraordinary technology, but with little influence over its future. 1. AI is ‘more important than electricity,’ claims the seller Anthropic takes in more revenue each day than it earned in the whole of 2023. The tech is powerful: NASA engineers have used its coding agent to plot a route for the Mars rover. Anthropic’s prospectus says that AI will transform the global economy “in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet.” 2.

Using a crisis – perhaps even a crisis of one’s own devising – as a pretext to seize power? It is a very old trick. Hitler and his National Socialists were once accused of using the Reichstag fire in such a way, and now the Effective Altruists (or EAs) stand accused of something similar.  The theory within the Trump administration is that EA and EA-aligned figures such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are whipping up fears of AI doom. They are doing so in order to scare governments into regulating technology – regulations that the EAs would themselves design. Amodei’s recent essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” called on AI companies to accept the oversight of a group called Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI safety NGO.

In the spring of 1722, a 16-year-old apprentice in a Boston print shop began slipping letters under the door at night, signed by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood, who did not exist. The apprentice was Benjamin Franklin. His brother James, who owned the paper, had no intention of printing his kid brother, so Franklin invented a woman and let her say the things he couldn’t. Readers wrote in guessing at the author. No one suspected the boy sweeping the floor. Franklin would go on to be a printer, a postmaster, a scientist famous across Europe for his electrical experiments and a founder of libraries, fire companies and, in time, of the United States itself.