Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, told CBS News that he backs federal regulation of AI and wants the industry to slow down, an idea supported by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk, but opposed by President Donald Trump.
CBS News reports that Amodei sat down with correspondent Jo Ling Kent at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, in an interview CBS News says took place the day before its Sunday relesae. “I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” Amodei said. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”
The interview came days after Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, posted a warning on social media this past Tuesday accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of building self-improving superintelligence. He called it “gambling with our lives.” In a CBS News interview Thursday, Coxon compared the risk to Hollywood’s darkest imaginings of machine takeover. “It doesn’t look that different from, say, ‘Terminator’ or from science fiction films,” he said. He put the danger bluntly: “It will be smart enough to kill us.”
Asked about the warning, Amodei didn’t wave it away. “I don’t think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was,” he said. He described AI capability as advancing along a steepening exponential curve, and said that trajectory should give the industry pause. “It doesn’t mean we need to panic today. It doesn’t mean we need to shut it all down,” he said. “But I would say it’s a warning sign. It’s a warning sign that we need to slow down.”
That echoes an essay Amodei published Saturday urging the tech industry to “slow the pace” of AI capability development, though he drew a line between slowing down and stopping. Asked whether Anthropic would halt releases of more advanced models, he said: “It doesn’t mean that. What it means is that we need to make sure that every generation of models that we release is properly tested.”
Part of that testing push: Amodei said Anthropic will give independent evaluators permanent, “employee-like” access to its AI models going forward. “Whenever anyone builds an AI model, there’s a third-party evaluator who can verify whether that company is following the safety practices that they’re committed to,” he said. “It’s like a food inspector.”
He also backed federal regulation of AI, as lawmakers weigh proposals ranging from an outright ban on superintelligence to a mandatory “kill switch” for high-risk systems. A full ban, he said, goes too far. “The AI kill switch could be a good idea. But I don’t think banning it, completely banning it, is the right approach,” he said. “One, the idea that we would never get the incredible benefits, never get the medical cures, that doesn’t sit right with me. Second, this technology will be built in other countries, including authoritarian countries.”
That last point set up one of the harder questions of the conversation: should the United States slow down even if China doesn’t? “This is the toughest dilemma. This is the toughest aspect of our situation,” Amodei said. He pointed to Cold War-era nuclear arms agreements between the United States and the former Soviet Union as a possible template for AI governance among nations. “The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” he said. “I think that’s going to be very difficult, because the incentives to pull ahead in the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.”
Amodei kept circling back to an uneasy fact: a private company is steering a technology this consequential. “My view here is, it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” he said. “People ask me that question all the time: Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable.”
Asked whether he’d hand the technology over to government control, he made a distinction. “To the right combination of governments,” he said. “The worry I have – I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically-elected governments, I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance.”
Breitbart News reported today that President Donald Trump has rejected calls for an AI slowdown. Trump initially dismissed the warnings outright. “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.” Hours later, aboard his flight from Ireland to Washington, he softened the message, saying he had spoken with some of the executives directly. “I’m not downplaying. But it’s going to be more good than bad, by a lot,” he said. He also said he has used AI himself, though he declined to say how.
President Trump later took to his Truth Social platform to share a more in depth message, in which he said Dario Amodei is trying to act like a “perfect little angel:”
The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” – and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Dario Amodei has launched a full spectrum PR campaign to push political and industry controls that would build an unbeatable moat around Anthropic’s business. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at CBS News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.