Anthropic CEO says AI must 'actually' cure cancer to win trust

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the AI industry can win over skeptics by delivering on its biggest promises, starting with a major scientific breakthrough.

In a rare post on X on Saturday, Amodei acknowledged the public's mistrust of AI and said the industry can only change that by producing tangible results.

"At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive," Amodei wrote. "The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world."

"The thing that will work is actually curing cancer," he added.

The AI industry faces a growing public backlash as it builds large data centers, scrapes copyrighted online data to train models, and upends the workforce. A recent Pew Research Center study found that roughly half of Americans felt the increased prevalence of AI in their daily lives made them "more concerned than excited."

Amodei has repeatedly warned about the dangers posed by rapid AI development. In a June essay, he wrote that Anthropic's new Mythos models present "very real risks" to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security. Last year, he warned that AI would eliminate half of all entry-level jobs.

Some other AI leaders have criticized the kind of rhetoric Amodei has become known for. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said earlier this year that his peers had been "way too certain" about dire predictions and encouraged them to dial it back.

As OpenAI and Anthropic gear up for expected IPOs, both have followed that advice, pivoting from doomerism to boomerism. But Amodei said in his Saturday X post that he doesn't think his warnings are the cause of the public's distrust.

"I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative," he wrote. He pointed to a lengthy 2024 blog post, "Machines of Loving Grace," in which he laid out how AI could radically transform the world for the better. "I wrote it because I didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture," he said.

Instead, Amodei said that the public's distrust of AI companies reflects broader skepticism toward corporations overall. "The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it," he wrote.

Anthropic's decision not to open-source any of its frontier models – a stance it says reflects caution – has contributed to the public's wariness. The company drew criticism last month for being the only major AI developer not to sign a letter advocating for open-weight AI as Washington considered restrictions on some Chinese models.

Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, has long argued that keeping frontier AI technology closed-source contributes to public distrust more than anything else. In an X post responding to Amodei, LeCun wrote that the "only way forward" is for AI to be "widely available, shared, and open."

"We need diverse AIs for the same reason we need a diverse press," LeCun wrote.

Not everyone agreed with Amodei's argument that a major scientific breakthrough could turn the tide of public opinion. Angel Brodin, an applied AI architect at OpenAI, wrote in a response that despite routinely delivering advancements in public health, the pharmaceutical industry is "still one of the least trusted industries."

"People also won't judge AI companies solely by their breakthroughs," she wrote. "They'll judge them by pricing, access, lobbying, opacity, how the economic gains are distributed, who gets to participate in its benefits, and who ultimately holds the power."

Amodei said Anthropic is ramping up work in the biological and medical fields to test his theory. "We hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months," he wrote. "When we've actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that."