David Streitfeld
“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan is credited with saying. Silicon Valley disagrees. Ever since the drama around artificial intelligence began heating up, technologists have unleashed bushels of commentary.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote 6500 words about how people who use a lot of AI will survive best in the AI world to come. Bill Gates spent nearly 6000 words arguing that AI will be humanity’s undoing unless we reorient human society and behaviour around it. Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose San Francisco house was attacked, needed only 1000 words to stress that “the world deserves huge amounts of AI and we must figure out how to make it happen”.
Billionaire Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the CEO of Anthropic, is one of the tech industry’s most prolific and polished explainers. He has contributed to dozens of scholarly papers and more recently wrote a half-dozen informal essays for the general public. Outside of a few references to such cultural artefacts as The Lord of the Rings, Carl Sagan and 2001: A Space Odyssey, these essays are generally measured, colourless, equipped with footnotes — an engineer’s reflections. The most recent was last Saturday.
Putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs is an old-fashioned thing to do, particularly when the topic being explained is a technology so amazing it might as well be magic. But as Anthropic moves ahead with what may be the largest public offering in history as soon as this fall, Amodei needs to forcefully reassure everyone that everything is on track. He’s losing if he’s not explaining.
His collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified. It’s not an easy task, convincing the world that something is a slam-dunk even though it will make Silicon Valley richer and more powerful while possibly leaving ordinary folks unemployed or — who knows? — dead.
Amodei’s own explanations have changed with the political weather. In January, he wrote in a 20,000-word essay, The Adolescence of Technology, about his wariness of regulations, saying they backfire and quickly become out of date.
Even worse: “They can potentially destroy economic value or coerce unwilling actors who are sceptical of these risks (and there is some chance they are right!).”
But in June, after the Trump administration asked AI companies to voluntarily submit new models for approval, Amodei said he was “grateful”. New AI products were like airplanes, he wrote in a new essay: “Their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.”
Last week, the AI disaster narrative again seized the upper hand. Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, quit with the dire public warning that Anthropic and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives”.
Amodei responded with a 3800-word essay, We Must Pace the Frontier. He proposed steps that would ensure AI companies like Anthropic slow down: “Pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm this.”
An Anthropic spokesperson wrote in an email that “Anthropic/Dario remain very much in favour of regulation” but “in the absence of regulation”, the company was immediately implementing self-regulation.
Amodei’s most basic point is that AI is inexorable but that it is also extremely difficult — or maybe impossible — to control. Even before Anthropic existed, when he was working at Google in 2016, he co-wrote a paper titled Concrete Problems in AI Safety.
It illustrates the many ways things can go wrong, using the example of a cleaning robot: “An office might contain pets that the robot, never having seen before, attempts to wash with soap, leading to predictably bad results.”
The growth in AI’s complexity since then has left the cleaning robot far behind. In The Urgency of Interpretability in April 2025, Amodei wrote: “We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it.”
By January, in The Adolescence of Technology, he was warning: “I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Amodei’s most revealing essay by far, written in October 2024, makes the definitive case for Silicon Valley. Forget about the risks of AI blowing up, he wrote. What will Utopia look like? For those who do not own shares in an AI company, the answer may be as unnerving as any disaster scenario.
The essay is titled Machines of Loving Grace. The source of the phrase is not acknowledged or explained anywhere in its 20,000 words, although there is a link in a footnote. The title comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, the poet laureate of the hippies, which ends like this:
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labours
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Literary critics debate whether Brautigan was being sincere or tongue in cheek, a hallmark of the ambiguity that surrounds good art. He wrote the poem during a stint at the California Institute of Technology, where he also wrote a brief poem that begins, “I don’t care how God-damn smart / these guys are: I’m bored.” Brautigan killed himself in 1984.
There’s no question that Amodei is being sincere. In Machines of Loving Grace, he wants people to join the cause because the results, even in the short term, will be so excellent. AI over the next couple of years, he wrote, will be like having “a country of geniuses in a data centre”.
With AI, Amodei added, our bodies for the first time will become entirely malleable. Freedom from disease is merely the start. There’s also biological freedom. This, he said, is: “the idea that everyone should be empowered to choose what they want to become and live their lives in the way that most appeals to them.”
In essence, AI will allow you to sculpt yourself into something else — to become, for lack of a better word, hot.
For instance, AI-accelerated biology will allow control over weight, physical appearance, reproduction and other biological processes, he wrote. Personalities will become tractable too. Diseases like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia and addiction will be effectively treated for the first time.
There are missing elements in Amodei’s essays. Politics as a means of controlling people’s lives, for one. Neither does a corporate world fixated on profits make an appearance. Healthcare companies, it’s implied, are benign. They will cure all ailments as a gift to humanity.
In the real world, AI is one reason healthcare costs for individuals are spiking. Hospitals and doctors are using the technology “to increase payments through better documentation of care,” the Times recently reported.
Beyond disease, beyond biology, there is psychology.
“Most of us have everyday psychological problems that are not ordinarily thought of as rising to the level of clinical disease. Some people are quick to anger, others have trouble focusing or are often drowsy, some are fearful or anxious, or react badly to change.”
[Amodei’s] collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified.
AI, it appears, could scrub some of us clean.
“Everyone can get their brain to behave a bit better and have a more fulfilling day-to-day experience.”
Brautigan’s most famous work was Trout Fishing in America, a meditation on life that has nothing to do with fishing. There is a character in it addicted to Kool-Aid. It shapes him, overwhelms him. “He created his own Kool-Aid reality,” Brautigan wrote. Silicon Valley seems to be creating its own AI reality.
Amodei, who is 43, doesn’t indicate in his essays that he is much interested in history. So I went in search of some precedents to this supposedly unique moment.
Brautigan’s mid-1960s creative heyday came during an earlier tech boom that has been largely forgotten. On April 2, 1965, Time magazine’s cover story was The Computer Society. The cover showed a humanoid computer dominating a crowd. It would be our new master.
Reading through the story now is like taking a stroll through Amodei’s essays. “Swept forward by a great wave of technology, of which the computer is the ultimate expression, human society is surely headed for some deep-reaching changes,” Time said. A computer guy is quoted: “When these new machines realise their potential, there will be a social effect of unbelievable proportions.”
It didn’t happen. If there’s any comfort to be had here, it may be this: fear and hype rarely make for good forecasts. As always, the future is uncharted. Machines of Loving Grace acknowledges that people will have to fight for a good outcome.
“The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give.”
But at least we’ll be really hot.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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