Anthropic CEO warns tech titans not to dismiss the public's AI concerns: 'You're going to get a mob coming for you'

"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a grave warning for fellow AI titans who dismiss the public's concerns about AI. "You can't just go around saying we're going to create all this abundance, a lot of it is going to go to us, and we're going to be trillionaires, and no one's going to complain about that," Amodei told Axios in an interview. "Look, you're going to get a mob coming for you if you don't do this in the right way.""

"It comes after Amodei published a sprawling 19,000-word essay on Monday called "The Adolescence of Technology," in which he laid out his vision for the future of AI. That includes his belief that the technology will turn the heads of some tech companies into trillionaires, and that humanity as a whole needs to treat AI like a "serious civilizational challenge." In both the interview and in his essay, Amodei called for more robust tax policies to ensure a broader distribution of the "abundance" that AI will create."

""I don't think this is the tax policies of old," Amodei said in the interview. "This is for a world where people are trillionaires." Amodei didn't go into detail, other than writing in the essay that the taxation could be "general or could be targeted against AI companies in particular," and that failing to proactively pursue those tax policies would lead to badly designed ones. He also said that he'd advised lawmakers, in addition to pursuing more progressive taxation, to support AI transparency legislation and to cut off the supply of chips to China."

AI companies that ignore public concerns risk significant public and political backlash if they concentrate wealth or fail to manage risks. Rapid AI progress could create extreme concentrations of wealth, potentially producing trillionaires, requiring proactive and updated tax policies to distribute resulting abundance more broadly. Taxation could be general or targeted against AI firms, and failing to design policies proactively risks poorly designed measures later. Policy recommendations include more progressive taxation, AI transparency legislation, and export controls on chips to strategic competitors. AI should be treated as a serious civilizational challenge demanding coordinated economic and security responses.

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