The contradictions surrounding AI have become impossible to ignore. The companies building it warn about catastrophic risk while simultaneously speeding up deployment, competing to dominate what we’re told is the most consequential technological transformation in history. Every player in the race, including governments, which are rushing to integrate AI deeper into military, educational, and administrative systems, publicly acknowledges the challenges and the dangers, and none can afford to stop.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” published in January, is a masterpiece of the form. Drawing on Carl Sagan’s Contact, he frames our current moment in AI as humanity’s defining crossroads. He claims we are at the turbulent threshold between the civilization we have and the one we might become, facing five categories of existential risk: rogue autonomous AI systems, misuse of AI for mass destruction, authoritarian capture of AI for political control, economic disruption, and extreme wealth concentration. He also foresees cascading indirect effects we cannot yet expect.
Seventeen days after the essay was published, Anthropic raised $30 billion in new funding, bringing its valuation to $380 billion. And last week, the same day as Axios’s scoop, the Financial Times reported that the company is looking to raise tens of billions more this summer, with an eye toward a $1 trillion valuation—which would top OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation.