“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan is credited with saying. Silicon Valley disagrees. Ever since the drama around artificial intelligence began heating up, technologists have unleashed bushels of commentary.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, wrote 6,500 words about how people who use a lot of A.I. will survive best in the A.I. world to come. Bill Gates spent nearly 6,000 words arguing that A.I. will be mankind’s undoing unless we reorient human society and behavior around it. Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose San Francisco house was attacked, needed only 1,000 words to stress that “the world deserves huge amounts of A.I. and we must figure out how to make it happen.”
Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the chief executive of Anthropic, is one of the tech industry’s most prolific and polished explainers. He has contributed to dozens of scholarly papers and more recently wrote a half-dozen informal essays for the general public. Outside of a few references to such cultural artifacts as “The Lord of the Rings,” Carl Sagan and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” these essays are generally measured, colorless, equipped with footnotes — an engineer’s reflections. The most recent was on Saturday.
Putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs is an old-fashioned thing to do, particularly when the topic being explained is a technology so amazing it might as well be magic. But as Anthropic moves ahead with what may be the largest public offering in history as soon as this fall, Dr. Amodei needs to forcefully reassure everyone that everything is on track. He’s losing if he’s not explaining.
His collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified. It’s not an easy task, convincing the world that something is a slam-dunk even though it will make Silicon Valley richer and more powerful while possibly leaving ordinary folks unemployed or — who knows? — dead.
Dr. Amodei’s own explanations have changed with the political weather. In January, he wrote in a 20,000-word essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” about his wariness of regulations, saying they backfire and quickly become out of date. Even worse:
But in June, after the Trump administration asked A.I. companies to voluntarily submit new models for approval, Dr. Amodei said he was “grateful.” New A.I. products were like airplanes, he wrote in a new essay:
Last week, the A.I. disaster narrative again seized the upper hand. Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, quit with the dire public warning that Anthropic and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives.”
Dr. Amodei responded with a 3,800-word essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier.” He proposed steps that would ensure A.I. companies like Anthropic slow down:
An Anthropic spokesman wrote in an email that “Anthropic/Dario remain very much in favor of regulation” but “in the absence of regulation,” the company was immediately implementing self-regulation.
Dr. Amodei’s most basic point is that A.I. is inexorable but that it is also extremely difficult — or maybe impossible — to control. Even before Anthropic existed, when he was working at Google in 2016, he co-wrote a paper titled “Concrete Problems in A.I. Safety.” It illustrates the many ways things can go wrong, using the example of a cleaning robot:
The growth in A.I.’s complexity since then has left the cleaning robot far behind. In “The Urgency of Interpretability” in April 2025, Dr. Amodei wrote:
By January, in “The Adolescence of Technology,” he was warning:
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Dr. Amodei’s most revealing essay by far, written in October 2024, makes the definitive case for Silicon Valley. Forget about the risks of A.I. blowing up, he wrote. What will Utopia look like? For those who do not own shares in an A.I. company, the answer may be as unnerving as any disaster scenario.
The essay is titled “Machines of Loving Grace.” The source of the phrase is not acknowledged or explained anywhere in its 20,000 words although there is a link in a footnote. The title comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, the poet laureate of the hippies, which ends like this:
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Literary critics debate whether Brautigan was being sincere or tongue in cheek, a hallmark of the ambiguity that surrounds good art. He wrote the poem during a stint at the California Institute of Technology, where he also wrote a brief poem that begins, “I don’t care how God-damn smart/ these guys are: I’m bored.” Brautigan killed himself in 1984.
There’s no question that Dr. Amodei is being sincere. In “Machines of Loving Grace,” he wants people to join the cause because the results, even in the short term, will be so excellent. A.I. over the next couple of years, he wrote, will be like having “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.”
With A.I., Dr. Amodei added, our bodies for the first time will become entirely malleable. Freedom from disease is merely the start. There’s also biological freedom. This, he said, is:
In essence, A.I. will allow you to sculpt yourself into something else — to become, for lack of a better word, hot.
For instance, A.I.-accelerated biology will allow control over weight, physical appearance, reproduction and other biological processes, he wrote. Personalities will become tractable too. Diseases like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia and addiction will be effectively treated for the first time.
There are missing elements in Dr. Amodei’s essays. Politics as a means of controlling people’s lives, for one. Neither does a corporate world fixated on profits make an appearance. Healthcare companies, it’s implied, are benign. They will cure all ailments as a gift to humanity.
In the real world, A.I. is one reason health care costs for individuals are spiking. Hospitals and doctors are using the technology “to increase payments through better documentation of care,” The New York Times recently reported.
Beyond disease, beyond biology, there is psychology.
A.I., it appears, could scrub some of us clean.
Richard Brautigan’s most famous work was “Trout Fishing in America,” a meditation on life that has nothing to do with fishing. There is a character in it addicted to Kool-Aid. It shapes him, overwhelms him. “He created his own Kool-Aid reality,” Brautigan wrote. Silicon Valley seems to be creating its own A.I. reality.
Dr. Amodei, who is 43, doesn’t indicate in his essays that he is much interested in history. So I went in search of some precedents to this supposedly unique moment.
Brautigan’s mid-1960s creative heyday came during an earlier tech boom that has been largely forgotten. On April 2, 1965, Time magazine’s cover story was “The Computer Society.” The cover showed a humanoid computer dominating a crowd. It would be our new master.
Reading through the story now is like taking a stroll through Dr. Amodei’s essays. “Swept forward by a great wave of technology, of which the computer is the ultimate expression, human society is surely headed for some deep-reaching changes,” Time said. A computer guy is quoted: “When these new machines realize their potential, there will be a social effect of unbelievable proportions.”
It didn’t happen. If there’s any comfort to be had here, it may be this: Fear and hype rarely make for good forecasts. As always, the future is uncharted. “Machines of Loving Grace” acknowledges that people will have to fight for a good outcome.
But at least we’ll be really hot.
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