For about 10 years now, I have argued that the *only* way forward is for AI technology to be widely available, shared, and open. Like the printing press and the Internet, AI amplifies human intelligence and efficiency by improving access to knowledge. To empower individuals, societies require a high diversity of AI systems with different value systems, linguistic abilities, philosophical/political biases, and specific expertise. We need diverse AIs for same reason we need a diverse press. Given the cost and complexity, this can only be achieved through open foundation models on top of which anyone can build systems with their languages, biases, expertise, and value systems. I have been more vocal about this over the last 4 years, since AI popped into the public discourse. I have made the argument in various forums: corporate C-suites, AI safety discussion groups, professional meeting, the US Senate, the UN Security Council, and the public sphere through media interviews, podcasts and social media posts. I totally agree with @finkd Mark Zuckerberg's recent piece in which he writes: "the notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” When @DarioAmodei writes: “some may object that we can simply keep AIs in check with a balance of power between many AI systems, as we do with humans", he is talking about me, among (thankfully) many others. It is the only good path forward. There will be nefarious uses of AI, as there have been with every technology ever invented. But it will be your Bad AI against my Good AI.

2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI.  I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative.  In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I make sure to frequently mention the incredible benefits as well as proposing possible solutions to the risks (short clips from my interviews that end up on social media tend to be disproportionately negative, as that gets clicks).  In fact, I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.  The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!).  And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process.  I feel the urgency here: I lost my father to Hepatitis C only a few years before the development of direct-acting antivirals (sofosbuvir), which cure 95% of patients and probably would have cured him. I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  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.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.  I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.  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. We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months.  When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.  But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them.  Honesty is the right thing on the merits, and in terms of public credibility and trust it is no worse than, and may in fact be better than, an approach that ignores or distracts from risks which people instinctively understand are real.

3 frontier models in one day! - Grok 4.6: Fable 5-level, but 85% cheaper. - Qwen3.8-Max: 2.4T params, 95B active. Weights are out. - DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813: weights could drop any time. Heard it’s good, not just benchmaxxing. Competition is great for consumers and businesses.

Super excited that I will be interviewing @lqiao CEO and founder of @FireworksAI_HQ at the @tomorrowxsummit in Austin, TX November 17-18. Lin’s vision of specialized intelligence is compelling and she is making it a reality. Fireworks is at the forefront of helping enterprises take an open source model, post-train it with proprietary data and then combine it with a frontier model behind a router to get frontier intelligence at a much lower cost. And per Bessemer they went from 100m in ARR to 1b in 16 months, which was faster than any company they have tracked other than Anthropic. 40 trillion tokens per day as of July!