Dario Amodei
CEO and co-founder of Anthropic
Anthropic
Lab leaders
Amodei left OpenAI to found Anthropic on the premise that frontier AI is dangerous and someone safety-focused should build it. He says there is roughly a one-in-four chance things go 'really, really badly', expects a 'country of geniuses in a datacenter' possibly by 2027, and lobbies for chip export controls and transparency laws rather than a pause.
Their number
10–25%
"somewhere between 10 and 25%" chance of something going "quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization" (Logan Bartlett Show, 2023). At the Axios AI+ DC Summit (September 17, 2025): "There's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly" and a "75% chance that things go really, really well" — while adding "I really hate that term" [p(doom)].Source
On timing
'Powerful AI' (a "country of geniuses in a datacenter") could arrive "as soon as 2027"; "we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023" (The Adolescence of Technology, January 2026).
SourceWhat they call for
- Export controls on chips to China
- Transparency legislation (e.g. California SB 53)
- Mandated gene synthesis screening and bio misuse classifiers
- Interpretability research
- 'judicious' regulation starting with transparency
- Responsible scaling policies
In their own words
"There's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly" / "I really hate that term" (on p(doom)).
17 September 2025
Essay 'The Adolescence of Technology': powerful AI possibly by 2027; calls to block chip exports to China during the 'critical 2025-2027 window' and to combine voluntary standards with 'judicious regulation, starting with transparency requirements.'
2026-01
Signed the CAIS statement that mitigating AI extinction risk 'should be a global priority.'
30 May 2023
Signed
- CAIS extinction statement 2023