Tech Explained: ‘Wake up to the risks of AI, they are almost here,’ Anthropic boss warns | AI (artificial intelligence) in Simple Terms

Humanity is entering a phase of artificial intelligence development that will “test who we are as a species”, the boss of the AI startup Anthropic has said, arguing that the world needs to “wake up” to the risks.

Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the chief executive of the company behind the hit chatbot Claude, voiced his fears in a 19,000-word essay titled “The adolescence of technology”.

Describing the arrival of highly powerful AI systems as potentially imminent, he wrote: “I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.”

Amodei added: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

The tech entrepreneur, whose company is reportedly worth $350bn (£255bn), said his essay was an attempt to “jolt people awake” because the world needed to “wake up” to the need for action on AI safety.

Amodei published the text as the UK government announced Anthropic would help create chatbots that support jobseekers with career advice and finding employment, as part of developing an AI assistant for public services in general. Last week, the company published an 80-page “constitution” for Claude in which it set out how it wanted to make its AI “broadly safe, broadly ethical”.

Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 along with other former staff members from OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. A prominent voice for online safety known for warning consistently of the dangers of unrestrained AI development, he wrote that the world was “considerably closer to real danger” in 2026 than it had been in 2023, when the debate over existential risk from AI raced up the political agenda.

He alluded to the controversy over sexualised deepfakes created by Elon Musk’s Grok AI that flooded the social media platform X over Christmas and the new year, including warnings that the chatbot was creating child sexual abuse material.

Amodei wrote: “Some AI companies have shown a disturbing negligence towards the sexualisation of children in today’s models, which makes me doubt that they’ll show either the inclination or the ability to address autonomy risks in future models.”

The Anthropic CEO said powerful AI systems that could autonomously build their own systems could be as little as one to two years away.

He defined “powerful AI” as a model that was smarter than a Nobel prizewinner across fields such as biology, mathematics, engineering and writing. It could give or take directions to or from humans, and although it “lived” on a computer screen it could control robots and even design them for its own use.

While acknowledging that powerful AIs could be “considerably further out” than the two-year timeframe, Amodei said recent rapid progress made by the technology should be taken seriously.

“If the exponential continues – which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it – then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,” he wrote.

Last year, Amodei warned that AI could halve the number of entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years.

In his essay, Amodei cautioned that the economic prize from AI, such as productivity gains from eliminating jobs, could be so great that no one applied the brakes.

“This is the trap: AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilisation to impose any restraints on it at all,” he said.

However, Amodei stated he was optimistic about a positive conclusion. “I believe if we act decisively and carefully, the risks can be overcome – I would even say our odds are good. And there’s a hugely better world on the other side of it. But we need to understand that this is a serious civilisational challenge.”