Visiting Anthropic’s Favorite Atomic Author
The West Seattle hillside home of Richard Rhodes, with views overlooking Puget Sound, is a good place to ponder the end of the world. Walk up a series of steps, through the front door and enter Rhodes’ home office, where his Pulitzer Prize hangs. He won it for his 1986 book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” a sprawling, 900-page account of the scientific discoveries that led to one of the greatest weapons ever created.
I made the trip to Rhodes’ house because his 40-year-old tome has become essential reading for employees at Anthropic and their leader, Dario Amodei, who counts it as one of his favorite books. Amodei has said he identifies with a central character in Rhodes’ book: Leo Szilard, the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and then aggressively advocated to keep it under human control.
The Anthropic CEO’s affinity for the historic account isn’t surprising if you read the profile of Amodei that my colleagues and I wrote this week. It traces how Amodei has long grappled with the weight of the technology he was building. He used air-gapped computers, machines disconnected from the internet, to compose early OpenAI memos to prevent remote hacking.
He worried about getting kidnapped in China, a U.S. adversary he feared was after key AI research secrets. These days he concerns himself with the security of the data centers that house the clusters of chips training Anthropic’s next frontier-chasing model. He and his sister, Daniela, another Anthropic cofounder, grew up wanting “to save the world together,” Dario has said.
Rhodes, 89, has never met Amodei. But he and his wife traveled to downtown San Francisco late last year to speak to Anthropic’s employee book club, which had ordered 100 copies of his book. Rhodes said he gave them a perspective that appears to cut against the “once-in-a-civilization” technology moment that Amodei and employees think they are building. Rhodes, who has also written about the history of technology changes, said he has watched the AI wave with a sense of déjà vu.
“The first thing that struck me most of all was what always strikes me with new technologies: the moral panic side. The general sense that this is going to destroy the world. It’s come up every time,” he told me. He went back in history. When 17th century Brits started using coal as fuel for the first time, preachers called it the “devil’s excrement,” he recalled. The rise of the automobile, last century, also stirred protests, he said.
“We get a new technology. It has its dark side and its bright side, and we slowly surround it with social, legal, moral, cultural controls until we turn it into a human artifact,” he said.
That might not be a stance that Amodei and his employees agree with. Amodei has pegged a 25% chance of AI going “really, really badly” for civilization. A big part of Anthropic’s technological and commercial success stems from the employees’ and Amodei’s deep belief that they are important, historic actors in an existential scientific historical moment. Its sensitive safety culture is an essential part of it.
Maybe they’re right, particularly as a series of cybersecurity attacks from AI agents are raising alarm bells recently, and the rest of us will be glad we had such responsible (and newly wealthy) stewards along the way.
Rhodes, meanwhile, has a different, perhaps more optimistic perspective. Rhodes is now working on a work of fiction about robots who take over the world, and all that’s left on Earth is a group of children. But the book is a comedy. “The robots are so stupid and the children are so bright,” he said.