Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he would be open to placing Anthropic under the oversight of a coalition of democratically elected governments, in a new interview with CBS where he was pressed on how much personal responsibility he carries for the risks posed by the AI technology his company builds.
Asked to zoom out on the stakes involved, with the interviewer framing it as a question of humanity’s fate, Amodei said it has always struck him as strange that the technology was built by a private company rather than a government. He said he agrees with people who raise that exact question, adding that he’s personally uncomfortable with the arrangement. Since government did not build the technology, Amodei said the responsibility falls on private labs like Anthropic to put in place legitimate oversight mechanisms, and argued that both government and the public need a real stake in how the technology develops. That’s the reasoning, he said, behind Anthropic’s public support for regulating the industry, since regulation both constrains what private companies can do and gives elected representatives a say.
When CBS followed up directly, asking whether Amodei would be willing to hand Anthropic over to the government, he said he’d consider it for “the right combination of governments.” Pushed again on whether that meant handing over the company itself, Amodei clarified that his real concern is symmetrical: a single government could abuse the technology just as easily as a single company could. What he floated instead was some form of joint governance among a combination of democratically elected governments — oversight rather than an outright handover. He acknowledged that building anything like that would be the work of years, but said he wonders whether that’s the direction the industry needs to move in.
The comments extend a position Amodei has been building publicly for a while now. He recently argued that AI development itself needs to slow down so that safety work at frontier labs, including his own, isn’t outrun by how fast models are improving. It also comes on the back of a year in which Anthropic has had to grapple with the practical side of scaling a frontier lab, including demand for its models growing far beyond what the company had planned for, which Amodei has cited as one reason the industry’s pace has become harder to control.