As bad as Sam Altman is, Dario Amodei isn’t all that different.

For sure, Dario stood the line, at least for a moment, on two of the most important issues of our time, mass surveillance of US citizens and using unreliable AI for military targets without humans in the loop, for which I immediately saluted him.

But he’s no saint, either. Let’s start with the military stuff.

Up until (and even after) Dario’s battle with the defense department, the defense department was actively using Claude for targeting, presumably with Anthropic’s consent and likely with their assistance. (Per the All-in-Podcast, “Anthropic benefited from Biden’s AI executive order, was designated as an early winner … [and] used this designation to sell into military and intelligence agencies, with forward-deployed engineers (Palantir style)… [becoming] deeply integrated into DoW workflows, far ahead of other frontier model competitors.)

-snip-

Forced to choose point blank between Dario and Sam, I definitely would go with Dario. But aside from his courageous stand on mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, Dario is more like Sam than almost anyone I can think of. Except for maybe Elon.