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He helped discover the laws that predict how intelligent AI systems will become. Then he realized no one was preparing for what would happen when they did.
In 2021, Dario Amodei walked away from his position as VP of Research at OpenAI -- one of the most powerful roles in artificial intelligence -- because he believed the organization he helped build was not taking the dangers of its own technology seriously enough. Within weeks, he and his sister Daniela, along with five colleagues, founded Anthropic on a premise that most of Silicon Valley considered paradoxical: that the people most terrified of AI should be the ones building it.
This is the definitive account of that gamble -- and of the scientist at its center.
Drawing on extensive research and Amodei's own public statements, Claude St. John traces the arc from a math-obsessed childhood in San Francisco's Mission District to the founding of what Dario has called the fastest-growing software company in history at its scale. Along the way, the book chronicles the discovery of the scaling laws that rewrote the rules of AI, the dramatic departure from OpenAI that sent shockwaves through the industry, the near-catastrophic entanglement with Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, and the creation of Claude -- an AI system trained not just to be capable, but to be good.
At the heart of the story is an extraordinary contradiction. Amodei has warned Congress, world leaders, and the public that AI may be the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created. He has described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could escape human control, destabilize nations, or end civilization. And then, every morning, he goes back to his office and builds it anyway -- raising tens of billions of dollars to make his models smarter, faster, more powerful. His defense is not that the danger is overstated. It is that the danger is precisely the reason someone with his understanding must be the one doing it.
Dario Amodei is a story about a brother and sister who bet everything on an idea the world wasn't ready for. It is about what happens when the scaling curves that one physicist discovered in a Baidu research lab begin to reshape the global economy, the balance of power between nations, and the very question of what it means to be intelligent. It is about the handful of people who saw the future coming before anyone else -- and who now must decide whether humanity survives its own greatest invention.
Part biography, part intellectual thriller, part warning, this book asks the question that Dario Amodei borrowed from Carl Sagan's Contact and has carried with him for twenty years: How did you do it? How did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourselves?
We don't have the answer yet. This is the story of the man who is trying to find it.
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