The AI billionaire about to take his company public once claimed that humans would eventually merge with machines.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a friend in 2007 that the Singularity — the moment when artificial intelligence achieves super intelligence and exceeds the ability of the human brain — would arrive by 2040, and a high school classmate claimed he was "obsessed" with building AI correctly to prevent the end of the world, the New York Times reported Thursday. As Anthropic quickly approaches a public offering currently valued at $1.45 trillion, Amodei's worldview shape's the company's desire for AI regulation amid the debate over how to handle the technology.
"We would over time become the new superintelligent A.I. or A.I.-human hybrid, Amodei told his friend Colin Heckman, according to the NYT. Amodei pushed his sister and friends to attend conferences on the Singularity with him.
Amodei's consumed niche media as a Princeton Doctoral student such as the blogs "Accelerating Future" and "Overcoming Bias," which both cover AI's future ability to destroy humanity, the NYT reported.
He was also interested in Ray Kurzweil's concept of transhumanism, the idea that humans should use technology to transcend human biology, the NYT reported.
Amodei was a research scientist as Chinese tech firm Baidu's AI lab between Nov. 2014 and Oct. 2015, and he has since become a vocal critic of restricting advanced AI chip sales to China.
"It is mortgaging our future as a country to sell these chips to China," the Anthropic CEO suggested at Axios AI + DC Summit in Sept. 2025, Axios reported.
"US export controls on frontier chips and SME to China have been a major contributor to the US's overall lead in AI, and these policies need to be expanded, tightened, and coordinated with other likeminded states," Amodei wrote in his June essay "Policy on the AI Exponential."
Dario Amodei says he gets mocked online every single day because Claude's biology safeguards are "too strict."
— Guillermo Flor (@guilleflorvs) November 5, 2026
His response: "I would rather they make fun of me than wake up one day and discover that someone used Claude to kill a bunch of people."
That's not PR. That's a… pic.twitter.com/f8iWptKcUF
Amodei's perspective of the world is largely influenced by rationalism and effective altruism, according to the NYT. Rationalism is the process of "thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions," effective altruism refers to the mathematical process of maximizing social good. (RELATED: Anthropic Floats Bill That Would Let Feds Step In Only When More Than 50 Lives Are On The Line)
"[T]he benefits [of AI] will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right," Amodei wrote in his Sept. 12 essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," where he advocated for slowing the rate of model advancement.
Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was "morally worthy of condemnation," when he contributed $1.25 million to president Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, according to Amodei, the NYT reported.
Thiel's Founders Fund was among a group of investors that contributed $30 billion into Anthropic in February, the company announced Feb. 12.
Amodei was "not comfortable conducting research on militarily powerful technologies in an authoritarian country," according to internal company messages he went while working at OpenAI, according to the NYT.
Dario Amodei says he gets mocked online every single day because Claude's biology safeguards are "too strict."
— Guillermo Flor (@guilleflorvs) November 5, 2026
His response: "I would rather they make fun of me than wake up one day and discover that someone used Claude to kill a bunch of people."
That's not PR. That's a… pic.twitter.com/f8iWptKcUF
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