Amodei: AI faces a crisis of trust, backs central regulator

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has addressed the growing public backlash against AI with unusual candor. In a lengthy post on X on Saturday, he wrote that the rejection is "fundamentally a crisis of trust": 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."

His self-criticism stands out: the most accurate criticism of AI companies, Anthropic included, is "that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world," Amodei wrote. Trust, he argued, cannot be won back with rhetoric: "The thing that will work is actually curing cancer."

Politically, the CEO takes a clear position: he supports a central AI oversight body modeled on FINRA, the US financial industry regulator. The right "rules of the road," he wrote in an exchange with California Governor Gavin Newsom, could simultaneously address cyber, bio and alignment risks, institutionally constrain the power of frontier AI companies, and leave room for open-weights models.

The intervention comes as trust measurably declines: a recent CNBC/Generation Lab survey of more than 1,000 young US adults (18–34) found 69 percent distrust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on AI governance, 70 percent distrust Elon Musk, and 71 percent Mark Zuckerberg.

Amodei also pushed back on the argument that regulation inevitably concentrates power. His point: honesty about risks is "the right thing on the merits" – and at least as good for credibility as a strategy of deflection.