Dario Defends Himself, Datacenter Panic, AI Doomer Trap, Senate Toss-Up

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. We had a huge, huge docket with me again, the core four, Chamath, Friedberg, Sacks and your boy Jake Howth. Topic one, topic one. Let's get right to it. No small talk, boys. Dario has spoken. Apparently, he listens to the All-In Podcast and he was compelled to respond to Gavin Baker's little discussion last week that many people inside, or some people allegedly maybe inside of Anthropic believe that they will be the only private company in the world at some point. Some folks from Anthropic, Sholto Douglas fired back, completely false, whoever told Gavin this is lying. Then Dario decided he would come out of hiding and he entered the chat with an epic two-part essay on regulation sacks. He said, quote, I know the Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation equals regulatory capture equals concentration of power, but I always found this to be an overly simplified picture.
On messaging, he said, quote, I do not agree my messaging has been disproportionately negative. It has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits. Took a little responsibility, quote, by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us. Most quoted line, the thing that will work is actually curing cancer, not glitzy marketing questions.
Sacks, you've been talking about Anthropic for a year and a half. He never responded. Gavin comes out and he suddenly is very talkative and responds. What do you take from the fact that he never responded to you, and then he responded to Gavin, and then we'll get into the details. Does he not want to spar with you?

**David Sacks** (1:52)
In fairness, J Cal, he did respond to me. I mean, I don't want to center myself, but the reality is he did not respond to what Gavin said. He easily could have said that what Gavin said he said is untrue, like Shalto did, he did not weigh in on that issue. Instead, he really weighed in on the regulatory capture issue. So that's the thing that I think drew him out here is I think he is a little bit irked by the fact that we keep accusing him of regulatory capture. And this is something I've been saying since last year, that they were engaged in a sophisticated regulatory capture scheme based on fear mongering. And those are the points he's really responding to. And I think the thing that he doesn't like about it is that he feels like it impugns his motives, that he's not pure and pursuing all these regulations for the right reasons. And my response to that is, look, there's no question that Anthropic has been extremely aggressive about seeking to implement its preferred regulatory frameworks at both the state and federal level. That is regulatory capture. Now, look, I think that Dario may be sincere in his beliefs. I'm not saying he's doing this for pecuniary reasons. Nonetheless, he is seeking to capture the machinery of the state on behalf of his political agenda. It's just there's not much to debate there, I don't think. There's a few other things to say about this. So let me go to point number two first.
He says that he's not responsible for the negativity around AI, that he's been balanced in his portrayal of AI. Oh, really?
Do you expect us to have amnesia about the fact that just about a year and a half ago, you said very specifically that within one to five years, 50% of entry-level knowledge workers would lose their jobs. And this was not just some sort of idle speculation on a podcast. This was something that they engineered and amplified into a full-fledged media campaign. You may recall that President Obama even retweeted this, and many other Democratic Party officials did the same thing. Moreover, this pattern repeats itself with the whole anthropic blackmail study. Remember, he's got a team at the company. They're supposedly studying alignment. They create this highly contrived study where they prompt this model over 200 times until they finally get the headline-grabbing result that they wanted. And again, my point here is that this is not just someone just riffing on the podcast about the alignment risk of AI. This is them actually creating a study, engineering that study, and then pumping it to create the headlines they wanted. And Dario and his sister, who's the president of the company and other executives, went on 60 minutes and breathlessly pumped this thing. And since that study has come out, a lot of people looked at it and said, look, this thing is highly contrived, including the UK AI Safety Institute, basically said that this thing was created under highly pressurized conditions, and they engineered the result.