Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei says the growing public resistance to artificial intelligence is not, at root, a messaging problem. In a lengthy exchange on X this week, Amodei pushed back on investor Gavin Baker, who argued that Amodei's own warnings about AI's dangers had helped fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against the data-center builds needed to run frontier models.
Baker, who made the case on the All-In podcast and in a follow-up post, wrote that Amodei had lost the argument on AI regulation and, as the leader of one of the most important companies in the world, should become a more positive advocate for his own industry. He pointed to Anthropic's support for a California law, SB 53, that imposes transparency requirements on large AI developers.
Amodei disagreed that his communication had been disproportionately negative. He said his writing was about equally balanced between risks and benefits, and noted he wrote the essay "Machines of Loving Grace" because he felt the industry was not painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could improve the world.
Where he conceded ground was on public sentiment. "The public has a negative view of AI," Amodei wrote, "and this is a big problem." But he rejected the idea that the skepticism is primarily caused by him or other AI leaders warning about risk. "I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust," he said. "I think that ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over."
The framing shifts blame away from any single executive's tone and onto a broader loss of trust in institutions. Trust is also a word that often comes up in headlines about OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, TechCrunch noted. Amodei described the crisis as decades in the making, with the AI backlash "just the latest iteration of it."
Amodei reserved his sharpest agreement for a narrower critique: that the industry has not delivered. "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," he wrote, adding that this is "totally on us."
On regulation, he rejected what he called a false choice between distributing AI without rules or concentrating power through rules. The common Silicon Valley shorthand, he argued, that regulation equals regulatory capture equals concentration of power, is an overly simplified picture of the world. Many people outside that bubble, he said, see regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people. Anthropic, he said, tries to design proposals that disadvantage, or slow down, frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors.
Update (Oct 19, 2026)
- Amodei argued that AI is "structurally" a technology that tends to concentrate power. He wrote that open weights "help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chip" (TechCrunch).
- He said promising that AI will cure cancer is "more a cliche than it is inspiring" and that what would change people's opinions is "actually curing cancer" (TechCrunch).
- Gavin Baker is a managing partner at Atreides Management, according to Business Chief.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is 'fundamentally a crisis of trust'
- Dario Amodei on X (exchange with Gavin Baker): x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758819304443967
- California SB 53 (AI transparency law): TechCrunch coverage of SB 53
- Business Chief: Anthropic CEO: AI Backlash Is Down to Industry Trust Crisis
