Negativity Bias

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.
Dario Amodei. Saturday, 15 August, 2026

I understand where Mr. Amodei is coming from here, but I think that I would portray the public as a little less paranoid. I don't believe that companies are setting out to "screw me over." Rather, I understand that the point of a business is to transfer wealth from other people to the owners of the business. Period. A business can set out to do just enough to maintain itself as a going concern, it can swing for the fences or pick a point in-between, but at the end of the day every business I deal with regards some or all of the money in my checking account as its rightful entitlement and seeks to find a way to transfer that to its owners.

And businesses have been known to go overboard. Back in 2013, Jamies Graigie, then the CEO of Church and Dwight, was railing against laundry detergent pods, which gained traction in the market when Proctor and Gamble (which had been working on the technology since the 1960s) introduced Tide Pods. Mr. Graigie's problem with Tide Pods was simple; they eliminated waste by providing precise amounts of detergent. But that waste translates directly into higher sales, and thus, to profits. Which is what shareholders want. More recently (two weeks ago), a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing accused corporations of using information gleaned about users to determine their willingness to pay higher prices, and thus charge them more. To be sure, there was a certain amount of grandstanding going on, with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) noting in a press release that companies were out to "scam working Americans out of their hard-earned money," but it's pretty much understood that this is how businesses operate.

So, as I would put it, the public has a negative view of generative automation because they understand that the goal of companies is to use technology to increase their profitability, whether or not the technology actually makes the public better off. And this is a rational understanding, because the big shareholders in companies expect this... it's why they invest in new technologies in the first place. Mr. Amodei's post on X was a response to an investor, Gavin Baker. And one of Mr. Baker's critiques in the overall discussion was that bringing up the dangers of generative automation, or actual artificial intelligence, if that ever arises, is frightening the public, and is thus a driver of opposition. And Mr. Amodei's response is basically that what people are reacting to is the perception, honed over decades (with the help of people like Senator Hawley), that the business of business is to benefit people like Messrs. Baker and Amodei (and maybe even Senator Hawley), at the direct expense of the public at large.

We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on.
Senator Josh Hawley

And while I don't buy into the talk of scams, since most businesses are not actively engaged in any sort of fraud, the fact of the matter is that money spends just as well regardless of how it was obtained. A business that makes $100 from providing good value for money can't do anything more with it than one that sells someone garbage or simply finds a way to provide nothing at all of use in return. And to the degree that money for nothing is a more efficient business model than money for value, it doesn't require an Economics degree to understand which option investors will find more attractive; especially in the short term. And this actively creates the sort of perverse incentives that Mr. Amodei understands erode public trust.

I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.  I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.  That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
Dario Amodei

I would go a step farther. Generative automation has to do more than simply "cure cancer" (which is a much taller order than Mr. Amodei's X post gives it credit for). It has to make that cure accessible to people who need it, rather than it simply being another way for "some of the biggest corporations in America" to extract money from people by leaving them with the option of watching family members die. If Anthropic creates a cure for cancer, only for Johnson & Johnson or Eli Lily & Company to monopolize it and use it to extract money from the public, the promise to benefit the world will still be considered undelivered on.

And here, Mr. Amodei's optimism may be showing. In a low-trust society, where many people feel that they can only trust themselves to look out for them, it's going to take more than technological advancement to win back trust. It's going to take showing people that they, and their interests, are important. But Mr. Amodei is certainly correct in his understanding "that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin" won't accomplish that.