The Co-Founders of Claude AI Tell Oprah About the Impact Artificial Intelligence Has on Your Life

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:00)
I was talking to parents recently who lost their son to suicide through a chat bot, and their parents don't even know they're speaking to them.

**Daniela Amodei** (0:08)
We don't allow users under the age of 18 to use Claude.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:12)
How do you know they're not lying? Will we even be thinking anymore? Will there be a need to think? What do you think of people falling in love with it now?

**Dario Amodei** (0:19)
I think that's a bad idea. Do you want to be addicted to these things, or do you want them to help you live your life?

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:25)
It goes back, I think, Dario, to what I read that you'd said before, that we can only defuse this at the speed of trust, at the speed of trust, and trust is currently in short supply.

**Dario Amodei** (0:37)
Something is happening to humanity with this technology, bigger than anything that, you know, maybe has happened in hundreds of years. And so we need to find some way for everyone to be an active participant in what is happening.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:54)
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Oprah Podcast. I'm here with two people who are shaping our present world and our future one. And I hear y'all don't love that description all the time, but it's the truth. I think most people would agree that that is pretty accurate. Dario and Daniela Amodei had the global artificial intelligence company, they found it, Anthropic, which right now at the time of this conversation is reportedly valued at $900 billion. And over a million people a day are signing up for Claude. These are the parents of Claude.
We're all getting familiar with that name, Claude Anthropics Next Generation AI chatbot and assistant. Many of you already use that every single day. So welcome to the podcast, the parents of Claude and others.

**Dario Amodei** (1:45)
Thank you for having us.

**Daniela Amodei** (1:46)
Thanks for having us.

**Oprah Winfrey** (1:47)
So I have to give it a disclaimer. I use AI for research all the time, and I use it for a lot of other things, but not for interviewing questions because I thought I have to keep the heart of myself in the questions until today. So this morning I asked Claude, what is the most pressing question Oprah Winfrey should ask Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a sit down interview? Claude responded with this. It said, you've said there's a meaningful chance the technology your company is building could cause human extinction and yet you're racing to build it faster. How do you justify that to the rest of us who didn't get a vote?
Dario, would you like to answer Claude? I thought that was a pretty damn good question, I must say.

**Dario Amodei** (2:37)
I agree. First of all, let no one ever say that Claude is soft on me or Claude is biased towards me or towards Anthropic. Like, you know, Claude throws hardballs. I thought that was pretty good. Claude doesn't pull its punches.
So to actually answer the question, this technology is an apoccal change for humanity. You know, at some point, humans started to use fire. At some point, humans built steam engines and factories and that created the industrial revolution. And so when I say things like this, I'm taking a very zoomed out perspective, right? If I said, well, I don't know, I think the industrial revolution could like lead to very powerful weapons and kill a bunch of people, that's definitely true, right? In some cases, it did do that.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:27)
Did do it.

**Dario Amodei** (3:28)
But you know, we understand that the industrial revolution as a process, as a technological event, was, you know, worth doing. We don't still want to be living in caves, but we need to manage it in the right way. And so the way we think about this company is, look, there's many companies building this technology. It's something that is happening to humanity one way or another.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:52)
We're in it.

**Dario Amodei** (3:53)
We're in it. And there's this train, it's going very fast in some direction. You don't want it to crash. You can't stop the train. But what you can do is you can steer the train. Steer the train so that it doesn't hit the rocks.
And you know, I think the way we think about Anthropic is, we want to do things the right way. We want to decrease that risk, hopefully to zero, and do things the right way.

**Oprah Winfrey** (4:18)
But why doesn't everybody want to decrease the risk? Why is there such a, what is the race toward?