Doomsaying is a terrible basis for public policy. Still, some of America’s top AI leaders are deploying that exact sort of rhetoric.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has repeatedly warned about the dangers of open-source AI, anointing himself as our generation’s cautionary priest on AI, despite leading a leading frontier lab seeking an initial public offering valuation near $1 trillion. Analysts are calling this “doom trolling.”
If Amodei has his way, open-source models would effectively be sent to software jail, never to be seen again. While he is entitled to his concerns, Amodei’s conclusions are cynical and backward. The United States must not label open-source technology the enemy. It’s key to winning the tech race, which will define the 21st century.
America is the envy of the world in technology for a simple reason: It didn’t hide from the future. It set out to build faster and better than anyone else, and did. As Neil Chilson put it when testifying before Congress in June, “We will not secure another quarter millennium of technological leadership by abandoning the principles that have brought us this far.” Those include competition, openness, diversification, and due process — in other words, the opposite of Europe’s approach to technology: safety first.
