Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has recently pushed back on the notion that he’s been unduly grim in his outlook on artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the future. His remarks came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued—both on the All-In podcast and in posts on X—that Amodei’s warnings about AI’s dangers have contributed to a growing backlash in the United States, particularly aimed at data centers. Baker contended that Amodei has “lost the argument” on AI regulation (Anthropic has supported certain rules, including a California bill requiring transparency from major AI firms), and given that “he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world,” Baker wrote, “I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry.”

Baker isn’t alone in suggesting that AI skepticism—and even government pushback—partly stems from taking the dire pronouncements of some tech executives at face value. However, in his response, Amodei rejected the claim that his “messaging has been disproportionately negative.” Instead, he maintained that his writing has been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits,” and that he penned his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” because he “didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.”

That said, Amodei did concede that “the public has a negative view of AI” and agreed that “this is a big problem.” Where he took issue was with the assertion that this negativity is “primarily caused” by him “or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.” He framed it differently: “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”

Indeed, “trust” frequently surfaces in discussions about the AI sector, especially regarding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amodei’s rival. In Amodei’s view, though, this crisis has been brewing for decades, with the current AI backlash representing “just the latest iteration of it.”

Amodei also offered what he considers the most valid critique of AI companies, including his own: “I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.” Unsurprisingly, he added that Anthropic is “doing our best to fix this.”

On the topic of regulation, Amodei argued that Baker presented “a false choice” between spreading AI widely without oversight or using regulation to concentrate the technology among a handful of firms. “I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world,” he said. “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.”

Still, Amodei clarified that he doesn’t “necessarily agree with that perspective either,” but that’s precisely “why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully.” He elaborated: “We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while *advantaging* smaller competitors.”