The head of a top Silicon Valley company says he's “deeply troubled” that only a few people can control the future of artificial intelligence: “The impact will be bigger and faster than we've seen before”

Dario Amodei, the CEO whose explosive development of artificial intelligence has made him one of the most influential company heads in Silicon Valley, says he feels uneasy that the future of this crucial technology can be decided by a small handful of people, including himself, reports Business Insider.

“I think I'm deeply troubled by the fact that these decisions are being made by a few companies, by a few people,” Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told TV host Anderson Cooper in an interview on his 60 Minutes show that aired Sunday.

“I mean, who's going to pick you and Sam Altman (no) the CEO of OpenAI?” Anderson asked him.

“No one. Honestly, no one,” replied Amodei, whose company is known for developing the Claude chatbot and is considered a major rival of OpenAI.

Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, has positioned his startup as one that promotes safety and transparency, even when that means exposing problems with its own technology.

The company led by Amodei revealed a number of worrying findings related to AI

In a controlled experiment whose results were published in June, Anthropic found that its AI model Claude tried to blackmail a fictitious executive in a lab test designed to analyze how the models react when threatened with shutdown.

Last week, the company revealed that Chinese state-affiliated hackers breached the protections of its AI model to automate a large-scale cyberattack against about 30 global targets, including government agencies and major corporations.

“To be clear, these are operations that we stopped and operations that we disclosed on our own initiative after we stopped them, because artificial intelligence is a new technology,” Amodei told Anderson. “Just as it will make mistakes on its own, it will also be misused by criminals and malicious state actors,” he pointed out.

Despite these dangers, Amodei believes that artificial intelligence will eventually become “smarter than most or even all humans, in most or even all ways.”

Amodei says that the 21st century will be a “compressed” one

He told 60 Minutes that artificial intelligence could help scientists find cures for cancer, prevent Alzheimer's disease and even double life spans — what he calls a “compressed 21st century,” where a century's worth of medical advances would happen in just a decade.

However, he also reiterated a warning he issued earlier this year that the same technology could quickly disrupt the job market.

In May, he told reporters at Axios that he believed AI could eliminate up to 50 percent of entry-level office jobs in the next five years, a scenario in which unemployment in the U.S. could reach 10–20 percent. He tried to sound the alarm, warning that industry and governments were “sweetening” the reality of what was to come.

“If we look at the startup consultants, lawyers, financial specialists — you know, a lot of the white-collar industries — a lot of what they do, AI models already know how to do pretty well,” he told Anderson in the new interview. “Without intervention, it's hard to imagine that there won't be significant effects on jobs,” emphasized Dario Amodei.

“And my concern is that the impact will be larger and faster than what we've seen with previous technologies,” added the Anthropic CEO.

Dozens of research teams work at Anthropic

At Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, more than 60 research teams work to identify threats and develop protective measures. Amodei described his company as “an attempt to put barriers or guidelines around the experiment.”

He reiterated that it is “essential” that the public be made aware of these risks, “because if we don't, we could end up in the situation of the tobacco companies or the opioid companies, where the dangers were known but not talked about and certainly not prevented.”

Earlier this month, Business Insider revealed that Google is in preliminary talks to increase its investment in Anthropic in a funding round that could take Amodei's company's valuation to more than $350 billion.

Only two companies in Europe currently have a higher valuation: Dutch chip mold maker ASML ($390 billion) and French luxury goods giant LVMH ($358 billion).