AI power concentrated in too few hands ‘almost by accident’, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei tells Nikhil Kamath

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI power is getting concentrated in the hands of a few companies. Amodei, who was in India as part of the India AI Impact Summit, spoke about the dangerous trend in an episode of Nikhil Kamath’s WTF podcast.

Speaking on the podcast, Amodei said he is ‘uncomfortable’ with a few people and companies having control over the powerful technology.

“There’s a certain randomness to how a few people end up leading these companies that grow so fast, and it seems like in the near future they will power so much of the economy,” Amodei said.

“I’ve said openly, publicly, not for the first time, that I’m at least somewhat uncomfortable with the amount of concentration of power that’s happening here. I would say almost overnight, almost by accident,” he added.

Amodei’s comments come at a time when leading AI labs like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, along with a few Chinese rivals, dominate most of the rankings on both text and image generation models. The power balance in favour of these AI firms is such that even blog posts and new product announcements by companies like Anthropic in recent months have led to multi-billion-dollar global sell-offs in software, tech and IT services stocks.

Tsunami is coming, warns Amodei:

Amodei also warned that AI is getting closer to reaching human-level intelligence and stated that there is a severe lack of public awareness regarding the massive shifts and risks that the technology will entail.

“It’s as if this tsunami is coming at us, and it’s so close we can see it on the horizon, and yet people are coming up with these explanations for, oh, it’s not actually a tsunami, that’s just a trick of the light,” Amodei said.

“Along with that, there hasn’t been public awareness of the risks, and therefore our governments haven’t acted to address them. There’s even an ideology that we should just try to accelerate as fast as possible,” he added.

Amodei, who earlier worked at OpenAI before starting his own research lab, also warned that AI will have massive economic and geopolitical implications.

“The economic implications are going to be enormous. The geopolitical implications are going to be enormous. The safety implications are going to be enormous. It’s going to transform how the world works,” he told Kamath.

During the podcast, he also said that there is a need to build AI the ‘right way’ and, despite the ‘language verbiage about doing it in the right way’, he wasn’t convinced while working at OpenAI that the company had a serious conviction in building the technology that way.