Anthropic CEO Blames AI Backlash on Broken Trust

Amodei rejected the charge that his messaging has been "disproportionately negative," saying his writing has been "about equally balanced between risks and benefits" — one major essay on each — and that he wrote "Machines of Loving Grace" because he "didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture" of what the technology could do.

He agreed the public's view of AI is negative and called it a big problem, but said it is not "primarily caused" by him or any other AI leader talking about risk. The distrust is decades old, he argued, and the AI backlash is "just the latest iteration of it."

He also said no ad campaign fixes it. An ad promising AI will cure cancer would be dismissed as deceptive, he said: "The thing that will work is actually curing cancer."

"I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world," Amodei wrote. "That is totally on us, and I think it's the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing."

On regulation, Amodei called Baker's framing "a false choice" between spreading AI widely with no rules and locking it up in a few companies through rules. "I know that there's a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I've always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world," he said, adding that "many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people." Anthropic, he said, tries "to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors."