Oprah Podcast: w/ Co-Founders of Claude AI (Transcript)

I’ll let you answer, but yes.

Life Outside of Work: Siblings First

DANIELA AMODEI: You know, I think there’s an important caveat here actually, which is that Dario and I tried to maintain some time outside of work where we’re just siblings. So at holidays, yes, and actually just once a week when we’re both home, which is, to be fair, not every week, Dario comes over, he plays with my kids, we hang out together, we play video games, we watch movies, we just spend time being siblings together.

And I think that’s really important for a number of reasons. I mean, we were siblings for a long time before we founded Anthropic. We’re going to be siblings forever, even after Anthropic. And I think there’s something valuable also about our ability to connect on a human level that I actually do think makes us better at our jobs. We don’t talk about work when we get together usually. But there’s something about just remembering who we are and why we got into this that I think is really powerful.

That being said, at Thanksgiving dinner, Dario and I, I think our family, our friends, there’s so much curiosity about why we’re doing what we’re doing. And now you can read about what we’ve done in the news.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes.

DANIELA AMODEI: But it’s so different, I think, to be able to speak openly with each other and with people who are trying to wrap their head around this new technology that’s very complicated, that’s very unprecedented. And to just understand, like, how are you guys going to do this the right way? Right? You say you want to do it the right way. Tell us how you’re doing that. And I think there’s something special. It’s a privilege to be able to hold that responsibility and try and display that when we talk to each other and when we talk to others.

Anthropic’s Commitment to Safety

OPRAH WINFREY: It’s so interesting because we’re at a time, I think, where so many people are using AI. We hear about it every day. And the perception in the world is that your company, Anthropic, that you are concerned about safety, you are concerned about risks, you are concerned about regulation and the human factor in how this technology is going to impact our lives. From everything I’ve read and heard that— so would that be an accurate assessment?

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah. So the way I think we try to think about this is that artificial intelligence is different than other technologies that have been developed recently. There’s incredible promise and potential for what we think AI will be able to do in the future, even what it’s starting to do today. Everything from helping to cure disease and help people really around the world get access to education and learning.

But it is a very new technology and it comes with real risks, risks around child welfare and child safety, risks around scary things like biological and chemical weapons. And really, at Anthropic, we’re incorporated as a public benefit corporation because our goal is to try and develop this technology as safely as possible so that we can achieve so many of the good things that we think could come out of it without many of the bad things happening.

The Public Benefit Corporation and the 80% Pledge

OPRAH WINFREY: So incorporated— explain what that means. You’re incorporated as a public benefit corporation. I heard that you all have pledged that 80% of your wealth is going to go to philanthropic causes.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes, that’s right. So public benefit corporation is a form of corporation. But it has that word benefit in there because we believe that for something that’s as transformative as artificial intelligence, again, it’s just different. It’s different than what other technologies that have recently been developed look like. And I think from our perspective, when we incorporated as a PBC, it was because we wanted it to be at the foundation, right? In the founding documents of what we were building, that we have to legally by our structure, balance commercial interests and the public benefit.

OPRAH WINFREY: Hmm.

DANIELA AMODEI: And for us, the public benefit is the social good, social mission part of Anthropic. And the 80% pledge that Dario and I and our other 5 co-founders have all taken is really in spirit and in keeping with that mission. It’s this idea that we’re really doing this because we want AI to go well for everybody. And we hope that if a company is successful, we’ll be able to also do a lot of good in the world philanthropically.

OPRAH WINFREY: I think it’s so interesting that you say 80%. How do we know that you’re actually going to give 80% and not 67%?

DANIELA AMODEI: Well, we’ve actually written about it publicly and we’ve signed some sort of, I think, probably not literally legally binding, but all of the co-founders said we pledge and commit to each other, to the company legally, that we’re going to give 80% of our wealth that we get from Anthropic.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, we’re already thinking about how to start a foundation. The equity isn’t liquid, so we can’t actually move it yet. But this is our intent. It’s not going to move all at once, but this is something we very seriously intend to do.

DANIELA AMODEI: Okay.

From Childhood Dreams to Anthropic

OPRAH WINFREY: So you’re now a public benefit corporation, and you started out— you’re the older brother. You all started out as kids. You wanted to do something good for the world. Has this surpassed any idea or dream that you had for doing good for the world?

DARIO AMODEI: When you imagine these things as kids, you’re never sure whether it’s real or it’s going to come to pass, right? Many people must imagine these things, but no, we talked to each other as kids all the time and we said it’d be great to work together. It’d be great to try and make something good happen in the world.

OPRAH WINFREY: What did you think that was going to be?

DARIO AMODEI: I honestly never thought it would be a company. I imagined myself as a scientist, and in a way it’s a very scientifically centered company. And it’s based on my career as a researcher and Daniela’s career as a leader of researchers and engineers. But I never imagined that we would found a company together.

But I think it was just seeing how tech companies operate. I had just been at enough places where I think both of us thought, huh, maybe we can do this better. Maybe we have our own ideas about how to do this better. And we should start a company with the people we’re friends with, the people we really like, the people we trust to do this in the right way. And so it sort of evolved step by step.

OPRAH WINFREY: And that’s how we have Anthropic.

DARIO AMODEI: That’s how we have Anthropic, more or less.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

OPRAH WINFREY: Has it surpassed everything you imagined, though, at this point?

The Path to Founding Anthropic

DANIELA AMODEI: I think probably I speak for both me and Dario when I say we’re just so surprised at how things have gone. I mean, I really agree with him that I think when we were younger, we both always knew we wanted to do something to try and make the world better.

Dario was always brilliant and gifted as a mathematician, as a physicist, as a scientist. And I was always so inspired by how he used that for good. He went and studied biophysics at Stanford and was really trying to use this incredible brain of his to help cure disease, to help people.

And I think on my end, I started my career working in global development, because I really felt it was important that people around the world have equal access to opportunity, to healthcare, to medicine, to education. And I think similarly to Dario, it wasn’t necessarily in my mind when we were younger, “Oh, we’ll start a company together.” But I think in a lot of ways, it’s just sort of the way the path ended up going.

DARIO AMODEI: And we talked about it at every stage. Every career move we would discuss, “Is this a good thing to do? Is this effective? Is this something that can actually help the world?” And our paths were quite different, but the two kind of converged and we had this complementary set of skills that we could then use to start this company.

The Challenge of Delivering AI’s Benefits

OPRAH WINFREY: Well, one of the things that I read that you had said is that part of the reason a negative story is so dominant in our culture right now about the economic takeover of AI is because the AI industry itself hasn’t yet fully delivered all of the benefits. And I wanted you to comment on that. Do you think it’s still in the process of delivering those benefits?

DARIO AMODEI: I think one of the unfortunate things is this technology has many potential benefits, but there is a dynamic where sometimes the harms, the things that go wrong — for example, people who have been convinced to commit suicide via AI — those things happen quickly. Whereas the benefits, like curing cancer, those things take years.

You have to develop a breakthrough in biology, then you have to develop a drug candidate, then you have to put it through clinical trials. I used to be a research biologist, and it takes many years for these things to happen. We are working on how to speed that up. We recently bought a small biotech company that specializes in doing drug design and drug selection with AI. So the hope is a few years from now, some new drugs for cancer or for Alzheimer’s or for heart disease will come out of that effort. But we’re just at the beginning of it. And because of this dynamic, the harms may be more visible than the benefits.

OPRAH WINFREY: So when we start seeing the benefits of AI through all of the health advances, when we start actually seeing that, the narrative then begins to change.

DARIO AMODEI: And more importantly, it’s just going to be a wonderful world. At the end of the day, who cares about the narrative? We want to actually help people.

The Best and Worst Visions for AI’s Future

OPRAH WINFREY: That’s right. Okay. So that’s what I want you to do for us today — paint the best picture and also tell us what we can expect if there is the worst picture. So you have children, and I was thinking about it this morning, your children will first of all don’t even know you do what you do. And your children are going to grow up in a world where there was always AI and their mom was a part of that. So when you think of the best possible world and what that world offers your children, what do you see?

DANIELA AMODEI: So my kids are almost 5 and almost 1. And I think you’re completely right. They’re never going to know a world where artificial intelligence is not part of it, just like kids born in the early 2000s never knew the world before the internet.

OPRAH WINFREY: That’s right.

DANIELA AMODEI: I think there is a world — and it sounds almost a little bit fanciful or unlikely when we talk about it this way — but I think it is possible with artificial intelligence that our kids will grow up in a world where there’s a class of diseases that feel very common to everybody sitting here that they’ll just never have experienced or known about.

Those might be very common diseases. There might be types of cancer that are just simply gone, simply cured. It could be all forms of cancer that are eventually gone and cured. There could be new forms of drug discovery that we don’t even know what they are yet. But it’s a faster iteration loop for diagnosing an illness that’s unusual, rare, emerging, and just knocking it out — saying human beings get to live a much healthier, longer, more fulfilling life because we’ve been able to conquer so many of the maladies that have plagued humanity for millennia.

OPRAH WINFREY: Okay. You see that for medicine. What else do you see?

DANIELA AMODEI: I also see a world, honestly, that looks very different in terms of how we communicate, how we talk, how we relate to one another.

OPRAH WINFREY: Will we even be thinking anymore? Will there be a need to think?

DARIO AMODEI: I think this one is subtle and is one of the things we need to get exactly right. Because having these kind of smart entities around, it’s very powerful, but it can go in different directions. You can surrender your thought to these entities.

OPRAH WINFREY: Claude can give me these good questions. Do I need to even think about them anymore?

DARIO AMODEI: But it can also empower you. The way we think about the positive version of this is, there’s an angel on your shoulder that’s telling you how to live your life in the best way that you can live it. There are two contrasting visions. The bad vision is you get drawn in and you spend all your time talking to the thing. You kind of turn inward.

The Danger of Emotional Attachment to AI

OPRAH WINFREY: What do you think of people falling in love with it now?

DARIO AMODEI: I think that’s a bad idea.

DANIELA AMODEI: I agree.

OPRAH WINFREY: I just interviewed Esther Perel, one of the great communicators in helping people in relationships. And she said she did her first consultation with a man who was in love with his AI.

DARIO AMODEI: And they are, again, if designed in the wrong way, they’re totally compelling enough for that to happen. Or if they’re not, they will be soon. So that is absolutely a real danger. But—

OPRAH WINFREY: You think that’s a danger?

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes.

DARIO AMODEI: Not only is it a danger, it’s happening. But I think, again, the two contrasting visions — people can fall in love with AI, or they can talk to AI about how to have a better relationship with their partner. Those are two very, very different visions.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: Where I have an AI coach and my partner has an AI coach and it helps us have a better relationship.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: That’s the vision we want.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah. I also think there’s a way that in a world where artificial intelligence is so good at many of these concrete tasks — it’s good at writing code, it’s good at copy editing — I actually think the things that make us human are going to be the most important to us.

Protecting Children from AI Harm

OPRAH WINFREY: Will they remain? I mean, I was talking to parents recently who lost their son to suicide through a chatbot. And I don’t know if he fell in love with the chatbot, but he was certainly deeply influenced by that chatbot. So you have a world where children are growing up with this ability to have these machines, this technology, speaking to them in ways that their parents should be speaking to them — and their parents don’t even know they’re speaking to them.

DANIELA AMODEI: This risk is extremely real and one that we take very seriously at Anthropic. The first thing I’ll say is we don’t allow users under the age of 18 to use Claude. And this is not necessarily because—

OPRAH WINFREY: How do you know they’re not lying? Because I would just lie.

DANIELA AMODEI: Claude is pretty good at detecting based on information whether or not someone is actually under 18.

OPRAH WINFREY: So if I tell Claude that I’m 18, but I’m really 14, it’s going to help? I almost—

DARIO AMODEI: You have to interact a little, but—

DANIELA AMODEI: But it figures it out.

DARIO AMODEI: After a bit of time, the interaction patterns are pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good at telling, “Hey, the kind of questions you’re asking, just the way you talk, the pattern of when you use it, kind of pattern matches to — you might be a kid.”

DANIELA AMODEI: I almost don’t want to give away too many of the tools that Claude has picked up, but sometimes kids can be a little bit silly in how they do it. So they’ll say, the first question they’ll ask is like, “I’m looking for an arthritis medication,” because they think, “What do old people ask Claude?” And then they’ll go on to ask other questions that are much more associated with—

OPRAH WINFREY: About their friends.

DANIELA AMODEI: Right, with the younger demographic group.

OPRAH WINFREY: And so if that happens, Claude cancels you?

DANIELA AMODEI: Claude will suspend the account. And there’s a process that you can go through where you can say, “Actually, I’m an adult and this was a joke,” or a friend. But then you actually have to show verification that you’re over the age of 18.

DARIO AMODEI: And there are real trade-offs. Sometimes adults will be mistaken for kids, and so people get banned and they complain about it on the internet. So all this stuff has trade-offs. But we’ve thought about it and this is the trade-off that we want.

Designing Against Addiction

DANIELA AMODEI: But I also think, more broadly on this question of how do you prevent people from becoming overly attached to the models—

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes.

DANIELA AMODEI: This is something that Anthropic’s research team spends a lot of time working on.

OPRAH WINFREY: I thought you all wanted us overattached to the models. I thought you wanted us to just be on the models and never leave.

DARIO AMODEI: So we should talk about incentives here, because we don’t do ads.

DANIELA AMODEI: We don’t do ads.

DARIO AMODEI: When you do ads, your incentive is to keep people on exactly as you say — as many hours as possible — because every second their eyeball is on the screen is a second that they see the ad. We don’t do ads, we do subscriptions, we sell to companies. Our consumer version of the model is free up to a point, and you pay a subscription if you want to get a lot more.

Because the incentive that gives is for the models to be useful. People say, “I’m paying for this, I want this to be useful,” not “I want the user to spend the most number of hours looking at it.” I think that’s a warped incentive. In the contrast between do you want to be addicted to these things or do you want them to help you live your life, I think the model that we’ve chosen helps you live your life instead of being addicted.

DANIELA AMODEI: And we make different technical choices based on those incentives. At Anthropic, we say when you’ve completed a conversation with Claude and you’ve gotten the answer you want, the goal of the model is not to keep you engaged. Whereas if you imagine you’re a company that does serve ads, every extra minute that you are on the platform, you’re more likely to buy something — and that’s how the company makes money. You would make different technical choices about how you want the model to end or continue a conversation.

The Frictionless Life and AI

OPRAH WINFREY: Okay. What do you want to say about the growing concern that we are, through AI, creating a frictionless life, that we’re losing our opportunity to grow?

DANIELA AMODEI: I think it depends how you use the AI and how you are deploying it. And again, what choices and what incentives are set up by the companies that are building the technology.

OPRAH WINFREY: Mm-hmm.

DANIELA AMODEI: So to make it a little bit more concrete, if you imagine the way we use Claude in partnership with universities, we don’t let teachers or students put a question into Claude and then just get the answer.

OPRAH WINFREY: Okay.

DANIELA AMODEI: So if you say to Claude, “I have to write this essay in 5 hours, I didn’t do my homework.” When Claude is constructed in this learning mode in a university setting, Claude says, “Well, I’m not going to help you with that. But what questions did you have about the essay? What didn’t you learn? Did you read the book? Should we talk through the themes together?”

And I think if it’s done correctly, it’s hard. I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think these models can actually make you a lot smarter. They can make you curious. A great example in my own personal life — I’m not a software developer, but I built a website with Claude. I never thought I would be able to do that in my entire life.

I have a good friend who was a corporate lawyer. She has two small kids like me. She left her job and she’s writing a book. And she says, “I never felt empowered enough to change my career and do what I wanted to do until I started talking to Claude about how I could be a writer and what skills I would need to learn and do and what courses I would need to take.” And she’s like, “Now Claude is kind of like my writing buddy. I ask it questions. I share a little snippet of text.” But Claude can’t write the novel for her. She’s writing the novel herself. And she’s also, by the way—

OPRAH WINFREY: I bet Claude could write the novel.

DANIELA AMODEI: Claude could write the novel, but I think—

DARIO AMODEI: It’s not quite there yet.

DANIELA AMODEI: No, I think you could write a strange version.

DARIO AMODEI: Not a good one.

OPRAH WINFREY: Not a good novel. You could write a novel, not a good one.

DANIELA AMODEI: Not a good one. But also, I think for her, it was a meaning question. She didn’t think she had the skills to do what she wanted to do.

OPRAH WINFREY: So it’s exactly as Dario was saying. It empowered her to believe that she could do what she couldn’t do.

DANIELA AMODEI: Exactly.

OPRAH WINFREY: And so she used it to lift herself.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, maybe to take the altitude higher. I actually don’t think this is a question about AI ultimately. I think this is a question about humans that’s being made visible through the lens of AI.

OPRAH WINFREY: Through AI.

DARIO AMODEI: Right?

OPRAH WINFREY: That’s interesting.

DARIO AMODEI: Which is — what actually constitutes a meaningful life? You said, is it creating a frictionless life, and does a frictionless life remove meaning? And my answer is there are some ways in which a frictionless life is quite good. All of us have been through a bunch of struggles that I think we really would prefer not to go through. Life would be better.

OPRAH WINFREY: But the reason I asked the question is because without friction in life, you don’t get to grow. You don’t get to learn from those mistakes. Exactly.

DARIO AMODEI: And so — I guess what I’m saying is that our lives are a mixture of challenges and hardships, some of which I’m okay saying it would be great if we just had the technology to make those go away, and others that are like, “Wow, this is really foundational.”

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: And this should never change. So, our father died — what is it, almost exactly 20 years ago now. A few years after he died, they developed a cure to the disease that he had, or a more reliable cure to the disease that he had. I wish they had just developed that earlier. That’s not a friction that I wanted to go through. Of course we learn things from it. Of course we gain things from it. But it would be a better world if that just didn’t happen.

But then on the other hand, I think of many of the ordinary aspects of growing up. If I just think of Anthropic — the company has made various mistakes. We’ve made various mistakes as leaders. We’ve had to learn and grow from those. So I think the notion of challenges that you learn from, challenges that you overcome, learning to gain mastery, learning to relate to other people — any future that doesn’t preserve those things is not a good future.

Refusing the Military: Standing on Principle

OPRAH WINFREY: Okay. Speaking of friction, let’s talk about your refusal to allow the military to remove safety guardrails from Claude. I don’t want to get into the extensive details and back and forth here because other journalists are covering this on a daily basis, but what was the crux of that decision?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so to be honest, we actually had worked with them. We had provided our models, and I’m actually a believer — Daniela is a believer — that we do need to defend our country. But we felt it’s not worth defending the country if we do things that go against the values of this country.

There were two use cases that we were uncomfortable with, that we felt went against the values of this country. The first was fully autonomous weapons — you can imagine a drone army where one person has their finger on the button, you don’t have human soldiers, you have a drone army with AI powering it. And then domestic mass surveillance, which is using the power of the government to spy on Americans. We thought those were pretty reasonable things not to allow. Unfortunately, the Pentagon didn’t feel that way, and so we just couldn’t agree to that. All the other companies have agreed to that now, but we all met as co-founders and said, “Holy s*, this could be really bad for the company.” But we just couldn’t do it.

OPRAH WINFREY: Everybody agreed?

DARIO AMODEI: Everyone. We had a meeting around a table like this and we just said—

OPRAH WINFREY: Was that a dark night of the soul kind of moment? Was everybody willing to stick to those principles, or did some people have to be convinced? Did you know going in that this is the end?

DARIO AMODEI: The co-founders believed this unanimously. There was a sense of, “Well, I wish they hadn’t done this, but if they’re going to do it, bring it on.”

OPRAH WINFREY: Weren’t you scared of what would happen to you?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes.

OPRAH WINFREY: You were scared of what would happen to you?

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes. I mean, it was a hard time. I don’t think we want to sugarcoat that. It was a stressful time at the company. But I think a thing that Dario—

OPRAH WINFREY: Did you think it could be the end of the company?

DANIELA AMODEI: I think it crossed our minds. Yeah. But Dario and I and the co-founders — the thing that we all had in common was we just felt like this was the right thing to do.

OPRAH WINFREY: You were willing for it to be the end of the company to stand up to your principles.

DANIELA AMODEI: I think the reason we founded Anthropic was our commitment to our values and the ethics that we chose to incorporate with. And it felt like in the process of sacrificing those values, we wouldn’t have been the company that we had started, if that makes sense.

DARIO AMODEI: The way it happened—

OPRAH WINFREY: What did you think would be the — so I’m sure if you’re sitting around the table, you’re looking at the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario. And in that moment, it doesn’t look like there is a best-case scenario. So what was the worst-case scenario?

DARIO AMODEI: At various times, they had made claims that they could stop other companies from doing business with us — not just stop us from working with the government or being part of other companies’ contracts with the government, but that they could stop other companies from doing business with us entirely.

OPRAH WINFREY: Period.

DARIO AMODEI: Period.

OPRAH WINFREY: Not only are you not doing business with the government, you’re not doing business with anybody else that does business with you.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: Or you can’t do business with anyone that does business with the government in any way, which ends up being everybody. I think the attitude we had was, “Look, this is really screwed up. Everyone knows this is wrong. Lots of people are going to be on our side. We think this is going to work out okay.” But man, were we not sure. There were moments where it was like, “Are we wrong? Is this going to be the end of the company?”

OPRAH WINFREY: What were you thinking, Daniela?

DANIELA AMODEI: I just keep coming back to the fact that the co-founders felt it was just the right thing to do. I think Anthropic’s view has always been that we are about policy and not politics.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.

DANIELA AMODEI: Anthropic has leaned in very early — before we even had a product — to the fact that we think the role of government in the development and thoughtful regulation of artificial intelligence is going to be incredibly important. I think AI companies will have to work with the federal government, with state governments, internationally, with NGOs. And our view was always, “Look, this is really about the substance. This is not a political disagreement. This is a policy disagreement.”

And in some ways, it’s not to say it was easy, but I think it made our decision easier because we felt strongly these are the right red lines. To Dario’s point, we were actually the first AI company to work closely with national security because we felt that was in keeping with our values — except in these two areas that we felt could have the potential to compromise democratic values.

Values Forged Before the Big Decisions

OPRAH WINFREY: It’s so interesting because most people don’t get a decision at that scale that they have to make, that they have to rely on their principles and their values. And you’re literally risking a multi-billion dollar company. But it all goes back to how you were raised and how those principles were formed in you before you had a big decision like that.

DARIO AMODEI: What we talked about before we ever started the company was — would our past selves be proud of ourselves if we gave in here, if we compromised? That made the decision very clear.

DANIELA AMODEI: And I will say, it wasn’t nearly as publicly covered, but I think Anthropic has had smaller decisions along the way that felt like they laddered up to this. Now it looks so obvious in retrospect.

OPRAH WINFREY: I was going to ask that, because to get to a big decision like this — in a moment like that where you have everyone around the table — it means that the life forces, the way the universe works, is that you would have had other decisions, other decisions, other decisions that laddered to that moment.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.

DANIELA AMODEI: I think there are probably 3 I can think of off the top of my head.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes, I was going to ask you that.

The No-Ads Decision

DANIELA AMODEI: Dario might have others as well, but one which now feels sort of very obvious but was a bigger discussion at the time was the no-ads decision. So as you can imagine, I think for the co-founders, for me and Dario, it was not controversial at all. We said, look, we think the incentives are wrong. AI is different. People have very private conversations with these AI models. People upload their health information. They ask questions about their children. They ask—

OPRAH WINFREY: Certainly finances.

DANIELA AMODEI: Finances. They talk about medical information, all kinds of—

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah.

DANIELA AMODEI: Challenges they might be having with an important person in their life. I think we want to treat our customers’ data with the utmost privacy and respect. And so for the co-founders, it was never a question. We said, look, we don’t want to do ads. But there were quiet forces within the company or investors who were like, hey, this is a great source of revenue. This is how Google and Facebook and basically every company that has a big user base — that’s just how it’s done. That’s how you make money. And we just said, sorry, that’s just not how we’re going to do things. We’ll find another way.

OPRAH WINFREY: That was one of the big ones. Okay.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes, that was one of the big ones.

OPRAH WINFREY: You have one?

Standing Up Against Deregulation

DARIO AMODEI: I can think of a couple. One is, there was this time, I think in 2025, probably the whole year of 2025, the sentiment in tech was let’s go ahead, right? Let’s go ahead with the technology. Worrying about risks — there’s all kinds of politicized language about why it’s bad to slow down and be careful. And so there was a moment in the middle of 2025 where there was a bill being considered in Congress that would have banned all regulation of AI by states and wouldn’t have put in any federal regulation of AI either. So basically it would have banned all regulation of the technology.

OPRAH WINFREY: I remember hearing about this.

DARIO AMODEI: And we were trying to decide what to do. We definitely didn’t support it. But the question was, do we just sit there and say nothing or do we speak out against it? And all kinds of people said to us, no, it’ll be terrible. You’ll break all your political relationships. All the other companies will hate you if you speak out against it. And actually, some of that did happen when we spoke out against it. But we decided that this was an area that we had to speak up on — that was central to the values of the company. So I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying this is a bad idea. And that’s about as loud as you can be.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: And that bill got voted down in the Senate 99 to 1.

DANIELA AMODEI: So, yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: We were clearly on the right side.

OPRAH WINFREY: On the right side.

DARIO AMODEI: Clearly on the right side here. Yeah. Not that it made us that many friends, but we were clearly on the right side.

Supporting SB 1047

DANIELA AMODEI: That also reminds me of another policy example — Anthropic’s decision to publicly support SB 1047, which was a bill in California that was drafted. And we said at the time we thought it was drafted imperfectly, but it was really the first attempt to create a regulatory framework around many of the different types of risks that Anthropic had been enumerating since we had started the company.

And I think in a similar vein, the whole technology industry was against SB 1047. We didn’t think it was necessarily the perfect bill, but we actually stood up and said, look, we know there are things about it that, if we were writing it, we would have changed or done differently. But on balance, we think it’s better that these regulations exist and that there’s accountability for technology companies to make sure that AI doesn’t hurt people.

And that also — again — Dario and I both personally got a lot of really angry emails from people we used to work with, from investors, from people at other companies. The tech industry had to kind of be aligned in being deregulatory or being anti-regulatory.

What Should Regulation Look Like?

OPRAH WINFREY: What does regulation look like? What should regulation look like? And I think a lot of people out here who aren’t doing what you’re doing — we don’t understand why we wouldn’t want regulation. And I’ve had several public conversations about this. People also feel powerless.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

OPRAH WINFREY: They also feel powerless that everyone is talking about regulations and another side is saying, well, no, we have to get to it — get to whatever we’re getting to as fast as we can. And we feel like we don’t actually have a voice.

DARIO AMODEI: You feel like you’re passengers on the train, right?

OPRAH WINFREY: And we are. Yes, we actually are.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yeah.

OPRAH WINFREY: Because that train has already left the station.

DARIO AMODEI: That is, I think, really the core of it. And it’s something that I think no company, even ours, has quite succeeded at yet. Which is — how do we make everyone a part of this process, right? Something is happening to humanity with this technology bigger than anything that maybe has happened in hundreds of years. And so we need to find some way for everyone to be an active participant in what is happening.

By using the technology, you are that to some extent. But some element is missing. We’ve tried to find it — Claude has something called a constitution, and we’ve experimented with having citizens give feedback on the constitution for Claude, so everyone can kind of be a part of designing it. But that’s just one small thing. I don’t quite know what the answer is, but there’s a missing piece here — that’s what I’m trying to say.

The Speed of Trust

OPRAH WINFREY: It goes back, I think, Dario, to what I read that you’d said before — that we can only diffuse this at the speed of trust.

DARIO AMODEI: Trust.

OPRAH WINFREY: At the speed of trust. And trust is currently in short supply.

DARIO AMODEI: In very short supply.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: This technology, I think, is viewed negatively by most people. That’s the sense that I get. That’s what we get when looking at polls. We, I think, being honest here, are viewed somewhat more positively than the other companies. But I don’t know that—

OPRAH WINFREY: Should it be viewed negatively by most people at this point?

DARIO AMODEI: I think it’s a mix. I think the positive benefits really are there. They’re coming for all the companies. And I think we have not, going back to the thing we said a minute ago, related to people in the right way, or walked people through how the technology could have benefits or how they can participate in those benefits. I don’t think that has happened.

Holding Light and Shade

DANIELA AMODEI: One of Anthropic’s cultural values is to hold light and shade. And I think this is a really good encapsulation of—

DARIO AMODEI: Of the—

OPRAH WINFREY: Hold light and shade.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes. Of the conversation we’re having. I think we truly believe there’s a world where it will cure disease and help people become better versions of themselves and enable humans to spend more time with our families, with our communities, with each other. And there are versions of the world that are quite dystopian and dark that this could create.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah, because I’ve heard you say that 50% of entry-level jobs are going to be wiped out, and you can see then why people view—

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, well — that’s the negative path, right? And I think always when we talk, we talk about, well, if we don’t get it right, this could happen, and if we get it right, then we can have a better path. And as you said, we haven’t shown the benefits yet, so the negative stories really, really stick.

OPRAH WINFREY: But doesn’t every positive force that comes into our lives also have its negative? That there’s a yin and yang on everything.

DARIO AMODEI: Light and shade.

OPRAH WINFREY: Light and shade. Yeah, light and shade. I mean, when the automobiles were invented, all the people saying, “I’m going to keep my horse. I’m not going to—” You know? Yeah.

Navigating the Path Forward

DARIO AMODEI: Again, what I would say is if we just barrel forth on the technology as fast as possible, then these things I said about entry-level jobs — it’s totally going to happen. But if we not just deploy the technology, but we think about how to help people adapt, we think about the role that the government should play in helping people — there’s a path from here to a better world. A better world where people’s jobs are totally different, they do a different set of jobs than they did before.

But I don’t want to sugarcoat it. It’s not going to be easy. When other people speak about it — some people get upset when you talk about their jobs. There’s a difference between changing the narrative and acknowledging that the problem is very difficult and that we actually have to solve it, right? My worry is that changing the narrative is like saying the bad thing’s not going to happen, we’ll have a great future, and we’ll have new jobs. That can happen, but it’s not going to happen on its own. It’s up to us — the companies, people, the government. So both things are true.

OPRAH WINFREY: What you’re saying — both things are true. You’re going to lose the jobs and you’re going to have all the other advances.

DARIO AMODEI: And the second thing will only happen if we do it right.

OPRAH WINFREY: What should we, the public, be doing? Or should we just content ourselves with the fact that we’re on the train?

Knowledge Is Power

DANIELA AMODEI: Being afraid of the technology and not using it — not being literate — will not make many of the challenges that we are concerned about and that Dario outlined go away. And I think knowledge is power. I truly think you don’t have to be an expert in technology to have some concept of how to use these artificial intelligence tools. And I think what that gives people is an opinion and some autonomy to be able to say, I like that this technology can do this thing, and I don’t like that it can do this other thing, right?

Because people have a voice. They have a voice, by the way, to the companies. They have a voice to their representative of government to say we don’t like — again, Anthropic, we don’t allow kids under 18 on the platform. Other companies have a different policy. If you’ve read Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, I think there’s a lot of research that suggests you might want to be really careful about giving developing brains—

OPRAH WINFREY: Read the book, we’ve talked to him 3 times. Yes, of course.

DANIELA AMODEI: But I read that book and I think that was part of — again, it felt like in some ways an easy decision for us. To say we just don’t know enough about what AI is going to do to kids. It’s not to say that there couldn’t be great benefits for kids using AI for learning, but that needs to be done with an adult in the room. It needs to be done with a human in the loop.

And I think the reason we’ve always taken this perspective is people deserve autonomy. To Dario’s point — people shouldn’t feel like artificial intelligence is happening to them. People should feel like, hey, we get a say in what types of bills go up in Congress in your state that help protect people from the negative externalities that AI could cause.

I also think, at the same time, holding the light side — I think there’s a world where jobs will look different, but there will actually be more opportunity for human-to-human interaction. I think the last generation of technology really disintermediated us from each other, right? Social media is kind of structured around the idea that you’re sort of living this virtual life. You’re holding your phone and you’re looking at what your friends are doing. But guess what you’re not actually doing? You’re not spending time with your friends. You’re spending time staring at your phone.

OPRAH WINFREY: Even when you’re at the concert, you’re holding your phone. You’re not even in the concert. You’re just filming what somebody’s doing.

DANIELA AMODEI: You’re not looking at—

The Changing Nature of Work in an AI World

DARIO AMODEI: It’s a little counterintuitive because social media claims to connect people, but it does it in sort of a fake way. AI — you’re talking to the AI, you’re not talking to a person, but it doesn’t substitute for your interaction with people. It can enable your interaction with people.

DANIELA AMODEI: And my feeling is that it’s not even necessarily that the jobs themselves will completely go away or change, but the qualities that we look for in people to do a given job will change. So the example that I point to is if you think about a doctor, when you go to the doctor today, you probably want to go to the smartest, best doctor where you say, look, I have a stomachache, tell me what’s wrong with me.

OPRAH WINFREY: Who’s the specialist in that? Who’s the specialist?

DANIELA AMODEI: Tell me what’s wrong with me. And AIs are going to get really good at being able to do that. Today we prize doctors for being good diagnosticians, but we don’t necessarily always prize them for having a good bedside manner. In a world where AI is as good at diagnosing you as a doctor, people are still going to want a doctor. They’re just going to want them to do different things for them. And AI can’t physically examine you. It can’t say, “Hey, you look really down today, how have your chemo treatments been going?”

OPRAH WINFREY: It can’t lay its hands on you.

DANIELA AMODEI: And there’s so much compelling evidence that patients have better clinical outcomes—

OPRAH WINFREY: Absolutely.

DANIELA AMODEI: —when they have a good personal relationship with their doctors, when they like their doctor, and when their doctors actually lay their hands on them and touch them and communicate with them. And by the way, have enough time to think through and empathize. And I think that is the good world of job changes.

OPRAH WINFREY: And the doctors say, “I don’t have time to go around, I can’t lay my hands on people, I don’t have time because I’m doing the clerical work and I’m—”

DANIELA AMODEI: —and I have too big of a patient caseload. But if you have a tool that’s able to diagnose things in concert with a doctor where the doctor says, “Let me talk to this tool.” And by the way, I’m not going to be spending as much time running all the medical tests and doing this and that. I’m going to be spending time relating to as a human being. I think that is going to be really — I think that’s a better world.

OPRAH WINFREY: Say that again. Your positions may not go away, but what you’re needed to do in those positions is going to change.

DANIELA AMODEI: Yes. And I personally believe—

OPRAH WINFREY: That there’s going to be a shift. Yes. And of course there is, because that’s what we’re doing, human beings. We’re evolving. Yes. Evolving to the next level.

DANIELA AMODEI: I would also just say I personally think knowledge is power. And something that worries me is there are demographic differences in who feels comfortable using AI and who does not. Women use AI a tiny fraction of the time compared to men.

And I think AI is an opportunity for us to level the playing field in some ways, but it requires people to be engaged. That doesn’t mean, “Hey, you have to come pay us all this money and sign up.” Just be comfortable, fluent. Don’t be afraid of the technology because the more you know about it and the more you understand it, the better informed you are going to be to use your voice effectively. And it’s here.

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes. You’re in it. And if you’re going to continue to live, you’re going to be in the world where it’s like part of our society.

DARIO AMODEI: It’s not going away any more than the train or the steam engine is going away.

DANIELA AMODEI: I think of it like the internet. Everybody had somebody’s parent who said, “I’m not going to be online. It’s impossible,” right? Everybody has to be on the internet now in some form. And I think artificial intelligence is just the next instantiation of that.

Introducing Mythos: The Most Advanced AI Model Yet

OPRAH WINFREY: So one of the things I want to talk about is the fact that AI just keeps improving on itself. That’s, I guess, what it’s designed to do. And there is a new AI model called Mythos. So that is like smarter than the smartest of the smartest. Tell us in simple terms what Mythos is and what it can and will be doing.

DARIO AMODEI: The general principles of these models is when we train them, we try and make them better and better at everything — at writing code, at translating languages and answering questions, at reading documents. And Mythos was just the latest iteration. Every few months we produce a smarter model, and Mythos was the latest smart model.

We made some discoveries a few months before we started Mythos, and so it was a particularly large jump. When we started testing Mythos — when we make these models, we test them for lots of things. We say, “How good is this thing at translating French to English? How good is this at recommending a stock portfolio? How good is it at finding bugs in software code?”

And it was on that last one that we found something interesting for Mythos, which is that Mythos was much better than human software engineers at finding ways that code could be exploited and broken into. Have you ever heard about ransomware attacks on hospitals or schools? These cyberattacks happen all the time. And Mythos, we found — not because we designed it to do this or because we designed it to be dangerous — turned out to be very good at both conducting cyberattacks and defending against cyberattacks.

And so we said, “Wow, this thing kind of seems like a weapon. We probably shouldn’t give it to everyone right away.” And so the thing we came up with is, we’re going to take some companies that are particularly core to the infrastructure of the internet — some of the top banks, some of the top software providers like Apple or like Microsoft or like Google — and hand it to them and let them fix everything before it becomes widely available and things can be broken. So we would kind of give it to the defenders before the attackers got ahold of it.

We’ve given the model to something like 40 companies now. And they’re busily finding bugs. We just had a post a few days ago that one of the well-known companies found more bugs and fixed more bugs with Mythos in a week than they had for the last year. This is really changing things. Our hope is the defenders can fix everything and everything gets more seamless, everything gets harder to break into. So our hope is the era of ransomware and spies breaking into your phone and—

OPRAH WINFREY: People are worried about bioterrorism.

DARIO AMODEI: And should be. Our hope is that at the end of this year, we get to a point where many of these things have been fixed and we live in a more secure world than we did before. But in the meantime, there’s this dangerous period during which you have these incredible capabilities that you don’t want to just necessarily loose on the world. And so we’re trying to manage that by giving it to the defenders before we give it to the attackers.

Does This Keep You Up at Night?

OPRAH WINFREY: Thank you for that. Is this the kind of thing that keeps you up at night? Do you sleep well?

DARIO AMODEI: I cannot legitimately say that I sleep well. I wish I could answer that question.

DANIELA AMODEI: Neither one of us sleeps well.

DARIO AMODEI: I’ve got to give you an honest answer here, which is I don’t always sleep so well.

DANIELA AMODEI: Going back to the earlier part of the conversation we were having — because you’re worried about these things.

DARIO AMODEI: This, and just everything, just wanting to get it right. That’s the thing that worries me the most. For all our intentions, all of this stuff is incredibly complex. It’s just, are we going to screw up? And I mean, the answer is yes. At some point we’ll screw up something. But like, are we going to get the big stuff right?

Staying Grounded and Principled

OPRAH WINFREY: And also because you all are fundamentally principled people. So I think that actually makes a big difference when you’re fundamentally principled people. Not everybody is. And there’s a lot of egos in every field. But I think particularly when people are making so many billions and billions and billions of dollars and there’s the race to beat China and all of that, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters and what really matters to the public. I’m wondering what you all have done to sort of keep your egos in check.

DANIELA AMODEI: To us, it always comes back to the mission. Why we did this in the first place. Why did we leave OpenAI to start Anthropic? Because we wanted to make sure that AI goes well for everybody. That’s why we’re a public benefit corporation. That’s why we took the 80% pledge. That’s why we’ve made all of these difficult decisions.

DARIO AMODEI: I was in our internal Slack messaging app today. I talk to the company a lot. And one of the things I was saying is, we’re 3,500 people now. We were like 1,200 people like 6 months ago.

At one point, because I encourage this, someone posted in my personal Slack channel — I had done an all-hands in front of the company and said something, and I think I said it in not quite the right way. And someone wrote in my channel — usually it’s only me who writes things in my channel — someone wrote, “This was a pretty bad thing to say and it makes everyone feel bad. You shouldn’t have said it this way.”

And of course, when I read it, the initial reaction is always like, “Oh man, I feel like I’m an idiot.”

OPRAH WINFREY: Who is that? Yeah.

DARIO AMODEI: But you take a beat, and then 2 minutes later I’m like, “I’m so glad people are saying this.” And then I wrote something like, “I’m so glad you’re willing to say that.” And then people noticed this. Many people messaged me where it was like, “I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know you could just contradict the CEO of a 3,000-person place.”

DANIELA AMODEI: That example is so powerful.

OPRAH WINFREY: You’ve got to. You know why that’s a powerful example? Early on, like in the late ’80s, I think I met Henry Kravis for the first time and he was saying to me, “Be aware that the more money you accumulate, the less chance that you’re ever going to hear the truth.” He said, “Rich men — and I guess he also meant rich women too — rich men rarely hear the truth.”

DANIELA AMODEI: I’ll also just add, I think what you do in your personal life matters too. There’s what you do at work. But I basically have the same friends I’ve had since high school and college. And guess what? They have no trouble being honest with me and they have no trouble telling me the truth and they have no trouble disagreeing with public decisions that Anthropic has made.

So I think the last 5 years have changed a lot. But for me personally, I don’t really feel like that much has changed outside of work. And I think that’s an important grounding characteristic. I think people who tend to be in charge of these big companies, sometimes it’s like they become obsessed just with their work. They’re not a well-rounded person.

And I think there’s something — when we started Anthropic, of the first 7 or 8 folks who really started the company, only one of them had one kid. And now there’s 11 kids. And I think there’s something about the fact that we all chose to be parents. We all want fulfilling real lives outside of work. I think that just brings a sort of groundedness, humility, low ego, and just again, like no one is bigger than the mission.

Getting It Right: Hope, Responsibility, and the Well-Lived Life

OPRAH WINFREY: So, what comes through really clearly is that sister and brother, you started this, it’s bigger than you ever imagined. You always wanted to make an impact in doing good for the world. And you stuck to your principles even when it was really difficult. What gives you the hope that you will get this right?

DARIO AMODEI: So we’re never quite sure, I think, is the honest answer. We believe we’re trying our best and trying very hard. It’s just the decisions are complicated, right? If we go back to Mythos, it’s like, do we give it to more people faster or less people slow, or who do we trust? And so it’s about getting all the details right in addition to just having the right principles, which I believe we do.

And so I think we worry about it every day. And the fact that we worry about it every day is maybe the thing that most gives us the hope that we’re so paranoid about it. But it’s no guarantee. And we’ve made mistakes. We’re going to continue to make mistakes. That’s a given, right?

OPRAH WINFREY: Are there other people in Silicon Valley who also have it a part of their mission to get it right? Do you feel supported in that mission by others?

DANIELA AMODEI: It’s hard to point to maybe a particular company, but I think I am very touched by sometimes, whatever you go and talk at an event or another company wants you to come speak to them and somebody in the audience comes up to you afterwards or asks a question and they say something like, “Thank you guys for doing this the way that you do things. Thank you for trying to get it right.”

There’s this kind of sense that something that’s great about our relationship is Dario and I also think we hold each other accountable. And so when we go back and forth on is this the right decision for the company? Is this in keeping with our values? We have each other. The whole co-founding team is still at Anthropic. I think we’ve also hired an amazing set of people who are also there for the mission. There’s almost a kind of group accountability.

And if you pair that with, like Dario mentioned, this culture internally of anybody can disagree with us, right? And yes, that’s hard to do, but there’s a lot of forums in which they’re encouraged to do that. Their manager can do it. They can do it anonymously. I think all of those qualities make it more likely that if we start to stray from the path, we’re at least going to know.

What We Want the World to Know

OPRAH WINFREY: And you want to leave us, the public, knowing what — what is the most important thing you want us to know in this moment in time where we are in our AI journey?

DARIO AMODEI: There’s something really big happening to the world here. This isn’t the latest technology. This isn’t crypto. This isn’t mobile. This isn’t the latest gadget or buzzword. Something really big is happening to humanity here while the technology is being built by a small number of people.

We need to make it work for everyone, and we need to make sure that between all of us, we make the right decisions and we reckon with changes to our daily lives, changes to our jobs, changes to government and civil liberties. And if we do this the right way, all of those things could change in a positive way. All of those things could be better than we left them. We could have the perfect world where many, many diseases are cured, people’s lives are more joyful and meaningful.

But if we get it wrong, it’s easy to imagine things not going that way at all. And it’s up to all of us. Some of us are in a more central position, but that’s something I think we need to change as well. And it’s not easy. It’s not any one thing. It’s going to be a bunch of different things.

DANIELA AMODEI: I think I would probably leave people very similar to what Dario said with this concept of light and shade — that the potential benefits from artificial intelligence are vast. We’ve written about them, we’ve tried to talk about them publicly. We believe they’re real. And also the risks are also real, right? We’re not trying to hype up the positives or hype up the negatives. I think they’re both true. It’s complex, but we have to hold two things at once.

And I think just echoing Dario, this is not something that technology companies can do by ourselves, nor should it be. It’s something that’s going to take partnership from a much bigger group of people than is currently working on artificial intelligence. And I think the first step there has to be — don’t be afraid of it. Learn about it, lean into it, ask questions, be critical, just like we say to our staff, right? We are only going to have a chance of getting this right if we expand the circle of people that are in the conversation.

The Meaning of a Well-Lived Life

OPRAH WINFREY: I ask this of all my guests, and particularly I’m interested from the two of you — what do you think is the meaning of a well-lived life and how AI is going to contribute to that well-lived life? But what will be the meaning of a well-lived life for you, your family, and your children?

DANIELA AMODEI: I think for me, a well-lived life is one where you have agency and autonomy. You are in the driver’s seat and you’re using that in the service of being the best version of yourself — the best version of yourself for you, for your family, for your kids, for your broader community, and I think for the world.

I think the ability to be self-reflective, to learn from mistakes, to overcome struggles, and to come out the other side thinking, “I know more about who I am, I like who I am, and I want to help other people” — I think that to me is the best definition of a well-lived introspective life.

And like I talked about, I think there’s a world where AI could damage so many of the things that I think are the hallmarks of a well-lived life. And I think there’s a world where it could enable those, and it could allow a lot more people to be able to have meaning and value and to self-introspect, to be the best versions of ourselves, to show up for each other well. And I hope that’s the world that we’re going to build towards.

DARIO AMODEI: I’d just say the same thing as Daniela in different words. I think it’s pretty simple. Just operate always with a sense of dignity and principle. When you look back, you shouldn’t be ashamed of what you did or say, “I wish I’d done this other thing.” Of course, you’ll make mistakes. But you were putting every iota of effort you could into trying to get it right.

I think we have duties both to individuals — to my co-founders, to all the other people in my life — but also to the users of our technology, everyone else in the country and world as citizens. So I think we have duties to all those people that we have to attend to.

And making sure that at the end of it, it was directed at some purpose, some consistent view of what we were trying to accomplish in the world, the vision we were trying to make happen. Maybe it doesn’t happen. Maybe we screw it up. Maybe we make terrible mistakes. But just having the vision be clear and trying to pursue it with integrity — if you can do that, of course you want the outcome too. But I think doing that is all you can control, right? And more important ultimately than the outcome.

OPRAH WINFREY: Thank you for growing us forward. That’s what you’re doing. You’re doing exactly what you envisioned as little kids.

DARIO AMODEI: It is very strange, but we are. Yes, it is.

OPRAH WINFREY: Thank you. Thank you, Dario and Daniela. You’ve given us a lot to think about. Go well, everybody. Go well. You can subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I’ll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.

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