Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei fires back at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's criticism, calling it a 'bad faith distortion'

Business Insider

a day ago

There's a new AI feud brewing. Two of the industry's biggest bosses clearly don't see eye to eye, and they've volleyed criticisms at each other in interviews.
In June, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he disagreed with "almost everything" Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. Now, Amodei has fired back with criticism of his own.
On the "Big Technology" podcast, host Alex Kantrowitz brought up Huang's past statements, characterizing the Nvidia CEO as saying Amodei "thinks he's the only one who can build this safely," and thus "wants to control the entire industry."
"I've never said anything like that," Amodei said. "That's the most outrageous lie I've ever heard."
Kantrowitz apologized if he misquoted Huang. "The words are correct and the words are outrageous," Amodei responded.
Huang's exact words were that Amodei "believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it." At the VivaTech Conference in June, Huang criticized Amodei's vision of a resulting white collar jobs bloodbath.
"AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it," Huang said of Amodei's thinking.
On the podcast, Amodei said that he didn't know where "anyone could ever derive that from anything that I've said."
"I've said multiple times, and I think Anthropic's actions have shown it, that we're aiming for something we call a race to the top," Amodei said.
In a "race to the bottom," AI competitors compete to push out as many features as quickly as possible, Amodei said. In that case, "everybody loses" because the system is unsafe.
But in Amodei's model, "everyone wins" because the safest, most ethical AI company sets the standard.
In a statement to Business Insider, an Nvidia spokesperson wrote that it supports "safe, responsible, and transparent AI," and that "thousands of startups and developers in our ecosystem and the open-source community are enhancing safety."
"Lobbying for regulatory capture against open source will only stifle innovation, make AI less safe and secure, and less democratic. That's not a 'race to the top' or the way for America to win," the Nvidia spokesperson said.
In May, Anthropic asked the US government to consider testing to "evaluate both domestic and foreign AI models for potential national security implications."
In a June op-ed, Amodei wrote against the idea of a regulatory moratorium, saying that "the White House and Congress should work together on a transparency standard for A.I. companies."
On the podcast, Amodei gave some examples of his company leading the "race to the top." Anthropic introduced responsible scaling policies, which other companies replicated, Amodei said. Anthropic also releases its interpretability research for public viewing.
As for Huang's claim that he's using safety as a ploy for market dominance, Amodei strongly disagreed.
"I've said nothing that anywhere near resembles the idea that this company should be the only one to build the technology," Amodei said. "It's just an incredible and bad faith distortion."