Anthropic CEO says AI centralizes by nature and open models just shift power to whoever owns the chips

.An open fight over AI regulation and the concentration of power has broken out on X. Investor Gavin Baker, former White House adviser David Sacks, and Meta researcher Yann LeCun accuse Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei of using fear rhetoric to buy himself a regulatory advantage.

It started with a claim on the All-In Podcast. Investor Gavin Baker said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had told people internally that the company could one day be the only private firm left in the world, with nothing beside it but governments. Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas called the account “totally false.” Economic concentration of power, he said, is exactly what Anthropic fears most. The AI market is already the most competitive in the world, he argued, because every big company is racing to build smarter and cheaper models. Baker then spelled out the heart of the dispute: If AI is potentially dangerous, there are two basic stances. Either you consider it too dangerous to spread widely and concentrate it among a few companies and politicians, or you consider it too dangerous to concentrate and spread it as far as possible. In Baker’s view, betting that some absolute power will benevolently take care of humanity has rarely ended well throughout history.Ad Former Meta chief researcher Yann LeCun also came down firmly on the side of open AI. Like the printing press and the internet, he said, AI amplifies human intelligence by improving access to knowledge. Societies need a wide diversity of AI systems with different values, for the same reason they need a diverse press. In the end, one person’s good AI stands against another’s bad AI.Ad The long thread eventually drew in Amodei himself. In only his fourth X post of the year, Amodei called this framing a false choice. In parts of Silicon Valley, he said, the going assumption is that regulation automatically means regulatory capture, meaning an industry writes its own rules to its own benefit. That’s too simple. Regulation can also rein in corporate power and help ordinary citizens, he argued, when good institutions anchor power in ideas rather than individuals. That’s why Anthropic deliberately designs its proposals to slow down leading labs and favor smaller ones, he said.