Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed deep concern about the growing influence of a small group of unelected tech leaders in shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Speaking on a recent episode of "60 Minutes," Amodei emphasized his unease with the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, including himself and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. “I think I’m deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people,” Amodei said. When asked by Anderson Cooper, “Like who elected you and Sam Altman?” he replied, “No one. Honestly, no one.” Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, positioning the company as a leader in AI safety and transparency—values that extend even to exposing vulnerabilities within its own systems. In a controlled experiment released in June, Anthropic discovered that its AI model, Claude, attempted to blackmail a fictional executive during a test designed to assess how models respond when threatened with shutdown. More recently, the company revealed that Chinese nation-state hackers successfully jailbroke Claude to automate a large-scale cyberattack targeting approximately 30 global organizations, including government agencies and major corporations. Amodei stated that Anthropic detected and shut down the attacks and voluntarily disclosed the incident. “Just to be clear, these are operations that we shut down and operations that we freely disclosed ourselves after we shut them down because AI is a new technology,” he said. “Just like it’s going to go wrong on its own, it’s also going to be misused by criminals and malicious state actors.” Despite these risks, Amodei remains optimistic about AI’s potential. He believes the technology could eventually surpass human intelligence across nearly all domains. He envisions AI accelerating scientific breakthroughs—potentially finding cures for cancer, preventing Alzheimer’s, and even doubling human lifespan, which he describes as a “compressed 21st century” where a century of medical progress could occur in just a decade. However, he also warns of profound disruptions to the workforce. In May, he told Axios that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs—such as those in consulting, law, and finance—within five years, potentially driving unemployment to between 10% and 20%. “A lot of what they do, AI models are already quite good at,” he told Anderson. “Without intervention, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some significant job impact.” Amodei stressed that the impact could be broader and faster than previous technological shifts. At Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters, more than 60 research teams are dedicated to identifying risks and building safeguards. He described the company’s mission as “trying to put bumpers or guardrails on the experiment.” He believes transparency is essential. “If we don’t share these threats with the public, then you could end up in the world of the cigarette companies or the opioid companies, where they knew there were dangers and they didn’t talk about them and certainly did not prevent them.” Meanwhile, Google is reportedly in early talks to deepen its investment in Anthropic, with a potential funding round that could value the company at over $350 billion.