Anthropic President Amodei on the Future of Claude

Thank you. We were chatting about not so long ago, when we first met and started covering Anthropic, But for those who aren't familiar, You and your brother Dario and a handful of other people left OpenAI to start Anthropic back in 2021. Now you employ thousands of employees. many of them in a reporting chain, up to you. in your role as president. I'm curious. What is the difference in the leadership style between you and Dario? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here today.

And, you know, Dario and I, I really think of how we sort of split duties. Dario is this incredible technical visionary. I think, you know, years before AI was this, amazing idea that people were excited about around the world, he had this really strong conviction that artificial intelligence is going to be a big deal. This is like early 2010s. And I think Dario is constantly reminding the company about the scale, the ambition, sort of where the technology itself is going. I think of my role much more as actually running and managing the day-to-day of the organization.

So I manage the executive team, We spend time making decisions about customers, about our products, about the research, and how that applies to the people that are using artificial intelligence. And I like to think that the two of us are a great balance. And I have to say, I don't know how one CEO just runs a company by themselves. It seems like it's actually much easier to do with two people, particularly when they know each other really well. I remember in one of our conversations earlier, you telling me that you and Daria rarely fight.

And I'm curious how you manage, what are some examples of places where maybe you have disagreed and have been able to, Settle it in a healthy way. with regard to the business. well as someone who also has a brother i know you know um you know i think we've had like you know, several decades to kind of practice fighting and getting-- and still loving each other, right? So as early as like-- Why did you take my toy? Can I have that back, please? I think that has served us well in being able to operate well together at Anthropic.

I think what I would say is that we do disagree sometimes. But I think how you disagree really matters. And I feel like there is always an incredible mutual respect between us. So if we look at the same situation and we see something different-- I like to think that what our default is is to be curious. So I usually view it as like, oh, this felt like an obvious call to me. Why do you see it that way? Because usually he'll have a piece of information that I don't have, or he'll have a different perspective.

And I would say about 80% to 90% of the time, what ends up happening is we meet in the middle. And so we'll think like, oh, I think this is the right thing to do. You think this is the right thing to do. Actually, there's probably a third way to do this. That's the combination of what we both think that's actually a little bit better. I think that's part of the strength of having both of us. the ability to practice looking at situations and decisions just from different points of view and perspective.

And I think it helps us make better decisions. So two years ago when you were sitting on the Bloomberg tech stage with Dario, Anthropik was still very much the underdog in the competition. against OpenAI and just in the race to AI generally. Now it's in a very different position, no longer the ender dog. Claude is a runaway success, particularly among coders. Your company is projecting 47 billion dollars in annualized run rate revenue, and the company has eclipsed OpenAI's valuation for the first time. Do you feel like you're definitively the front runner right now?

And how does that change your approach? You know, something that I think both Dario and I really hammer at Anthropic is That is just completely the wrong way to think. I think our view has always been, this is really about how do we show up every day for our customers? How do we stay humble and make sure that we're really focused on the mission? The whole reason we started Anthropic is we want to be able to build and develop this technology in a way that is ethical, that's responsible, that's fair.

And I think it's really incumbent upon everybody at the company, but especially leadership, to say, you know, all of these numbers, they're actually not the point, right? We are really here to do a job. We're here to support the businesses that rely on us every day. AI is increasingly a bigger part of everybody's workflow, their experience at the office, their experience in their personal lives. That's a huge privilege and responsibility. And so I think, if anything, we work really hard every day to say, Our job is to be the best version of who we can possibly be as a company every day.

That takes work, that takes humility, that takes time, that takes focus and energy. I want to talk about the big news earlier this week, that Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO. SpaceX has also filed. expected to file any time now. How far back have you been planning to file? And do you think that there's a race here to be first among the AI companies? So yes, you're correct. We confidentially filed our S1, and that gives us the option to potentially go public after the SEC review. Unfortunately, that's all I can say about anything IPO related.

I'm sure you understand. I mean, if we can just maybe level up a little, what is the calculus for a kind of an AI company generally to go public or not in this moment? What are some of the pros and cons here? Because on the one hand, yes, you can access more capital if you're not a startup. But on the other, then you're beholden to quarterly results, shareholder calls, et cetera. So what are some of the pros and cons just generally for an AI startup, do you think, to go public in this moment?

- So I think, at least speaking for ourselves, and I think probably really for the AI industry more broadly, It's a very capital-intensive business to train AI models. I think that's something we've been very open about from day one. I don't think that's a surprise in the industry. And I think this kind of concept of how do you access the level of capital that you need to train these models, right? It's a really big kind of upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them. And, I think that is, you know, my guess is that, you know, over time, the sort of core set of companies that are working to advance the frontier are just going to need access to capital.

And I think the public market is very well suited to that. So there's obviously, of course, trade-offs, My sense is there's just a fundamental structure of how training and serving these models for customers I think works that it will require that level of access. It's clear that many businesses can't get enough of Claude, But at the same time, We are hearing about some customers who are concerned about the pitfalls of so-called token maxing, of companies making leaderboards, of who uses the most AI tokens for using AI's sake. Um. Uber's-- one of Uber's executives talked about it getting harder to justify AI spend if there isn't a clear metrics-backed ROI.

Do you think there's truth to the idea that some businesses may be overspending on AI tools in this early experimental phase, and they may cut back? as they move out of that phase? So I think kind of two things are true at once here. I think, you know, I like that you said, you know, experimental, because I think the reality is it feels like these AI tools are so powerful and so capable, which is true. And comparing them, you know, particularly to, you know, even two years ago when I was when I was on stage at Bloomberg with Dario, I think the models have just come so far in what they're able to do in the economic value that they provide.

But I actually think there's a lot more distance. to go still for what the models will be able to do, you know, two to four to six to eight years in the future. And I would suspect that we will see some, you know, some... experimentation in different fields to understand how do you kind of get the most value out of these models for what particular workflows I think the second thing that's true is You know, how businesses are choosing to use AI will change. So the use cases today, some of them I expect will continue to be kind of the the primary driver of you know efficiency or um creativity or you know new approaches to doing things within businesses whether that's coding or um you know financial services legal health care But I also think as the industry as a whole, not just the AI industry, but really the business community, gets more familiar with the tools, we're all going to learn together.

Like, what is the best way to apply these tools that also supports employees? And so I think today there's this feeling that it's like, oh, like AI, you know, the leaderboards, and it's like, I have to use it, and what do I even use it for? And I think my hope is that over time, It'll be more incorporated into the day-to-day of how humans do our work, how we communicate together, and that there will actually be a lot more value realized in a way that feels really good to people. Does Anthropic have a leaderboard itself?

We don't have a leaderboard, no, or at least not in the way you've described. We do track... how much we're using Claude internally and for what use cases, because we really try to prototype all of the tools that we give to our customers. And so all of the products that you see, whether that's Claude code, Claude design, co-work, like all of these are things that we actually built at Anthropic first because we said, hey, this is a real need we have. Could Claude help us with this? And so I think it's important for us to just have a metric for checking, like, how are we using it and how much are we using it?

But there's not like you must use AI and you must use Claude and it's better if you use it or not. What type of job function outside of coding or research. are using Claude the most internally. The entire company uses Claude for topics large and small. Probably the second biggest, I would actually say, is finance. And so a lot of the kind of back-end financial planning analysis, just number analysis, I think Claude is really, really helpful. at that. But honestly, our people team built an incredible tool internally for how we do performance reviews that leverages Claude.

We're in the middle of performance review season. I have to say, the feedback from our team has been so positive. It just feels so much more fun to do this. It's so much more interesting, interactive. It's pulling in, information about what I did over the course of the past six months when I'm assessing myself. And I think that it really just speaks to the generality of these tools. their ability to, I think, reach across a business and just take a lot of information in and help you as an employee, be more successful in your role.

Dario and Anthropik's leadership has been vocal about the need for more compute. Your company recently made a major deal with XAI to least compute. There are others. OpenAI made a big splash sort of earlier on with securing huge data center deals and spending up to a trillion on infrastructure. Why did Anthropic take a little bit of a different approach? And in hindsight, Do you think you should have done more earlier on, on the compute front? We've talked publicly about this concept of sort of a cone of uncertainty related to compute.

And I think something that's important to know is you the the sort of structure of these deals is you have to commit to a certain amount of compute reasonably far in advance. And so I think Anthropik's view has always been We are wanting to plan for the best outcome, but not overextend ourselves such that we're buying more compute than we could productively use. It's really hard to predict that. you know, perfectly. And I think we would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we're able to serve, then the inverse where you overshoot and then you're actually like not in a great situation because you've bought something, you can't pay for it down the road.

It is really hard to get this right. I think the industry as a whole is still grappling with how to kind of structure these deals, but I think my sense is, It's impossible to know what the future will look like On balance, I continue to think it's better to be fiscally responsible and think carefully about how much you're going to buy. Make sure that you have the ability to actually use all of that compute in the future. And we'll probably undershoot or overshoot at some point a little bit. In the announcement with SpaceX, Anthropik expressed preliminary interest in using potential data centers in space.

What do you think about that? Is that a reality? And how far out are we from that? I don't think that data centers in space are something that will be on our to-do list in 2027. But, you know, I will say AI is... the field that has surprised me the most. It's probably surprised the world the most in terms of just what new things are possible, are made possible, by the advent of this technology. So no immediate plans for working with the astronauts to get Space Center data centers going, but you never know.

A few months ago, Anthropic had a very public battle with the Pentagon over restrictions. on its AI software. Are you more or less optimistic today about finding a solution to that? Anthropic has been really leaned in from day one and talked very publicly about our commitment to national security. And we were the first AI company available on the top secret cloud. I think our commitment to these values and these principles are also very, very old. It's not a new thing for us. I have to say, I've been very impressed the degree to which we've been able to work productively with the administration around a wide variety of topics.

And I think that's actually been the much bigger story over a long period of time. is our ability to partner productively with government at all kinds of levels. Because fundamentally, I think artificial intelligence is and will be a geopolitical issue. And in order to be an ethical and responsible lab, We need to work with governments around the world, in the US, but also in partner countries, to say, how can we roll this technology out in a way that's safe, in a way that's good for people, that's going to protect democracy?

And so I do really feel optimistic about this in the long run. Do you think other companies like OpenAI or Google have been able to negotiate better deals with the government because of Anthropics sticking to its position? You know, I think every individual company is going to have their own stance and sort of their own principles about like what what their red lines and what their values are. And my sense is, Anthropic will always be as open as we can be about what our principles and values are, why we have those principles.

But ultimately, I think it's important that whatever those values are for you as a company, that you are true to them. that you feel like you can explain them to employees and to the world more broadly. And fundamentally, we can't really control what other businesses are going to do. I think Anthropic's role is to be the best version of itself, again, to say, We're the only organization in this situation. How would we want to behave? I think that's really the best way we've been able to navigate many difficult decisions at the company over the years.

I think philanthropy seems to be a big part of Anthropics culture. I know you and many Anthropics co-founders have pledged to give away half of your equity. 80%. Sorry, 80% of your equity. I'm curious, would you be in support of something like the proposed a billionaire tax ballot in California that would impose a one-time tax on individuals whose net worth exceeds one billion. So Anthropic has, I think, again, pretty publicly talked about the fact that-- We think AI is going to create a huge amount of wealth. We're already seeing that.

And I think we've been pretty open about this idea that that should be redistributed in some fashion. Both the pledge and then a lot of views of Anthropic, when we're talking about potential for labor displacement, are really grounded on this belief that If we don't take intentional actions, AI, like many technologies, will probably widen the gap of inequality and disparity. That's not what we want to see. So I think there are a lot of interesting suggestions kind of floating around for how to approach that. Of course, the part we can control is what do we, as a company, and as individuals, as co-founders, sort of choose to do with any economic benefits that we get from AI.

But I think this is a really big and important question that actually goes beyond the walls of any individual company. There's a lot of potential upside with AI to cure disease or lower the cost of consumer goods, but also real fears that, you know, Dario has validated saying, Last year, the AI could potentially wipe out half of all white collar work. Do you agree with that? And if so, what's the solution? Is it something like-- more taxes, we talked about basic income, job retraining, and How do you pay for all of that?

Sorry. I think AI Is. we're already seeing the ways that it's disruptive. I don't necessarily think we know the future. exactly what the type of disruption that might happen a year or three years or five years from now is unknown. I do think it's important for companies to be open about and study what we're seeing today, which is part of why we publish our societal impacts research. We say, hey, here is how people are are using AI, is it displacing jobs, is it supplementing jobs? What we found so far is that in 2025 and 2026, Replacement is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.

of what AI is doing. And really where we see that is mostly in jobs that are overseas, and mostly in customer support. And so these are jobs that are sort of already being automated by more traditional ML, non-generative AI systems. Could that change in the future? Absolutely. And I think we're a little bit unusual in the sense that we talk about it a lot. We say, hey, this might happen. But I think there is this just broader, again, sort of societal challenge. AI is going to be able to do so many productive things that humans can do today.

What does that mean for how we find meaning, how we earn income, how we relate to one another? And again, I think the default will be to treat it like past technologies. and say, OK, we're going to integrate this into existing workflows, and that's sort of the end of the story. I personally believe there's a real opportunity here for us to say, how do we accelerate and sort of accentuate the parts of doing work and finding meaning that only humans can do. And this very fundamental belief that humans like to spend time with other humans.

We like to create things together. We like to relate to one another. Sometimes we like to disagree with each other. And I don't think AI will fundamentally take that away from us. But we have to figure out how we apply that within the existing economic infrastructure so that people can still find meaning in their work, and so that people have a way to earn a livelihood. Again, I think there could be a lot of different ways to structure that. But I think this is an important moment for us generally as a society to say, what are the lives that we want humans to be able to live, and how do we work closer towards that future.

Two months ago, Anthropic unveiled and restricted access to Mythos, your most powerful model, right, citing significant concerns about its potential to wreak havoc on critical software. Yeah. by spotting and exploiting security vulnerabilities. Now, anthropic plans to release these mythos. level AI models more widely. Can you help us understand what's changed in the past few months? Are you confident that these Models are different now in any meaningful way from the version before? Are they safer? This is a great question. We actually on Tuesday just expanded the set of customers that have access to Mythos.

I think it's about an additional 150 organizations around the world in 15 different countries. And really, our approach to mythos has always been, there's a time component to it. So we released it initially to cyber defenders. So some nonprofit groups, some governments, some organizations that are critical infrastructure for protecting against potential cyber attacks. And what we found is, Just like in any kind of security vulnerability situation, you have to give the defenders a head start. The technology-- AI models are going to keep advancing. If it's not us one day releasing a mythos-level model another AI company will.

But it actually matters who you give access to first and how long they have to patch some of the vulnerabilities that Mythos was capable of revealing. And so we're taking this very cautious, very tiered approach, which I know in some ways is frustrating because people really want access to the model, But I think-- again, as a company that's founded on these principles of being ethical, being responsible, We thought it was important to give access to the organizations that were capable of really helping us defend against some of these risks and then slowly widening that circle to more and more critical infrastructure until eventually we feel it's safe to release it more widely.

So far, Anthropic has been very focused on enterprise, even now you're talking about that rollout. But could we see a push into consumer this year? So we do have a consumer product. It's ai. And I think we have always, really from day one, felt that enterprise and business is the best kind of spiritual fit for Anthropic and our values. I think this focus on trust, on responsibility, reliability, transparency. These are just so baked into the DNA of Andropik the company And I think we have an increasingly growing consumer base. It mostly looks like professionals and individuals that are using AI for productive uses.

So it doesn't necessarily have to be work. Sometimes it is. But it's often for advancing your own skills and knowledge, whether that's in a hobby or helping I'm a mom, helping me organize applications for preschool when my son was younger i mean claude is so powerful in being able to just help help abstract away some of the administrative duties of just being a person but i think the difference to us in our consumer product maybe compared to competitors is we're not it's not an entertainment tool We're not using it for people to sort of have fun and have it be this-- it can be fun to use it, but it's really for kind of productive activities whether those are at work or at home.

And I think, I believe that is going to continue to be, you know, a reasonably large number of people that wants to use that product and service, even though enterprises are our primary focus.