Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in the company's IPO roadshow video that cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease and mental illness "will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade." The line has spread across X since Tuesday, November 10, 2026. Most of the loudest replies came from doctors, biotech leaders and scientists, and most of them said the timeline is not realistic. A smaller group cheered.
For the full quote, the S-1 wording and drug development timelines, see our report: Amodei says AI could end major diseases within a decade. This post collects what people said about it. Like and view counts are as of about 3:30 AM PT on November 12, 2026.
How the clip spread
The biggest post was a short one. @ns123abc wrote on November 10 at 11:12 AM PT: "Anthropic CEO predicts cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness will be cured in less than 10 years", and then one word: "ACCELERATE". It had 14,073 likes and about 3.1 million views.
The clip itself came from @firesidealpha, which posted the video at 7:15 AM PT the same day (2,012 likes, about 676,000 views). @MTSlive shared it that evening as "SITUATION DETECTED" (2,801 likes). Yahoo Finance and other news accounts picked it up from there.
Doctors and drug makers: "not likely"
The most-shared expert reply came from cardiologist Eric Topol. Quoting the @ns123abc post, @EricTopol wrote: "Setting an unattainable objective. I wish it would come true, but curing all these diseases in the next 10 years is impossible." Topol added: "And I'm very optimistic about the impact of AI for improving health." That post had 930 likes and about 125,000 views.
On November 11, CNN medical correspondent Meg Tirrell posted the quote and asked: "What do you think, bio folks?" Several drug industry leaders answered in quote posts:
- Dave Ricks, whose bio lists Chair and CEO of Eli Lilly, wrote: "I think that would be amazing and I think it's not likely. The map of biology is still largely a blank page and randomized human proof is the long pole in the tent. I am excited about the use of AI in our sector but progress will likely be steady and incremental." (561 likes, about 86,000 views.)
- John Maraganore, founding CEO of Alnylam per the account bio, wrote: "Unfortunately, there is an enormous gap in biological data. While the impact of AI will be incredible, it will sadly be a very long time before disease is a 'relic of the past.'"
- Alex Harding, whose bio reads "An internist in biotech," wrote: "These comments undermine his credibility. I am a big believer in the potential for AI in our industry, but Dario is either extremely naive or cynically hyping his company going into an IPO." Harding added that "false hope comments like these" do real damage to patients.
The most common point was that clinical trials take time no matter how fast discovery gets. @MelindaBChu1, whose bio lists an MD from Saint Louis University, replied: "No matter how good AI is you can not change the length of a trial to assess a condition like Dementia. It is 5 years minimum for Phase 1, 2, 3 trials." @RighttoTryGuy (Steve Martin) made the same point: "If they discovered the cure for all of these diseases TOMORROW they still wouldn't be treating any patients outside of clinical trials for another decade." The rest of that post pitched Montana's right-to-try rules to Anthropic staff.
Germany's former health minister Karl Lauterbach posted in German. In our translation, Lauterbach said it is unclear whether people like Amodei know so little about medicine or are deliberately deceiving the public, that cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and mental illness can benefit from AI, but that this is impossible in only 10 years, and that the focus should be prevention.
The pushback also has an earlier source. On November 4, Benzinga reported, citing the Wall Street Journal, that Vertex executive chairman Jeff Leiden called a tech leader's claim that AI would cure 90% of human disease in seven years "complete BS." That was a week before the roadshow video, so it was not a reply to this clip, but several posts this week cited it.
A hit to credibility
Some posters said the claim made them trust Amodei less on other topics. Ramez Naam, a clean energy investor and author, quoted Tirrell's post: "Dario has a PhD in biophysics. Yet the below statements are just not credible. To me, this puts his judgment in question. Every time he says something like this, my confidence in everything else he says drops." (626 likes.)
Georgia Tech evolutionary biologist Will Ratcliff was blunter, describing the claim as "Olympic-level, more Trumpy-than-Trump" followed by a profanity. Ratcliff added: "it's a cliche in Silicon Valley that AI will magically solve all these extremely difficult, and diverse, medical challenges."
Harvard Medical School microbiologist Michael Baym quoted the @MTSlive post with a dark joke: "You know what would drive the incidence of all of those diseases swiftly and simultaneously to zero?"
AI critics: "marketing"
Longtime AI skeptic Gary Marcus quoted the clip: "most likely none of these will be 'relics of the past in ten years'. But Dario will have cashed your check by then." Marcus opened that post with "scam artist" and posted several more replies over the next day, including one sharing Ricks's answer.
Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, tied it to Amodei's warnings about AI risk: "When journalists ask me about oh but the CEO himself is warning about his own thing causing extinction, I tell them to wait a few days and see how he'll also argue the other side, that he'll bring utopia." Gebru added: "Both sides of the same coin marketing his product as a machine god." (473 likes.)
Meta and NYU AI researcher Ravid Shwartz Ziv wrote a satire of an all-hands meeting where each step to curing disease is a coding benchmark. An intern says: "I just think the bottleneck might be trials, or wet lab time, or patient data. Probably not how fast we merge pull requests." (477 likes.)
The embryo screening thread
A separate thread focused on mental illness. Ari Schulman quoted the @ns123abc post: "Central to Amodei's vision for how AI will 'cure' mental illness is genetic screening, meaning he expects human reproduction via sex to be largely replaced by mass embryo production and mass screening in labs on this same timeline". The second half is Schulman's reading. Amodei's 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace does say "It will probably be possible to prevent most of these diseases via embryo screening," and calls screening for complex traits "controversial."
Philosophy professor Megan Fritts quoted Schulman with a mock dialogue that ends: "It's high-tech eugenics." It had 947 likes, slightly more than Topol's reply.
The optimists
Supporters were fewer, and most posts were short. Interventional oncologist Jason Williams quoted Tirrell: "I think this is very real for cancer." Williams argued that keeping the immune system young could stop most cancers from starting, that "AI will certainly help us find them much earlier," and that "It will take time to prove prevention in trials, but we will get there." (206 likes.)
@ItsPeptime, a peptide seller's account, quoted the clip: "The greatest time to be alive in human history, argue with a wall" (45 likes). @KjHardrict wrote that it is "almost certainly a bit of a marketing play for their stock value" but still "an extremely viable future," though that post had only 55 views.
What we did not find
We found no Hacker News thread with real discussion of the clip. We did not find a public reply from Amodei or Anthropic to the critics as of this writing. Anthropic has started its own drug programs, so the test will be trial results, not posts.
For more on the IPO, see what people said about Anthropic's S-1.
Sources
- Anthropic IPO site, roadshow video
- X posts linked above, by @ns123abc, @firesidealpha, @MTSlive, @EricTopol, @megtirrell, @DaveARicks, @JMaraganore, @AlexHarding7, @MelindaBChu1, @RighttoTryGuy, @Karl_Lauterbach, @ramez, @wc_ratcliff, @baym, @GaryMarcus, @timnitGebru, @ziv_ravid, @AriSchulman, @freganmitts, @jasonwilliamsmd, @ItsPeptime, @KjHardrict
- Benzinga: Drugmaker CEOs Say AI Alone Can't Cure Diseases (November 4, 2026)
- Dario Amodei: Machines of Loving Grace (October 2024)
