The Making of Dario Amodei | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Dario Amodei

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54 pointsspenvo14 comments

I generally am impressed by Anthropic's focus on safety, but I was taken aback by this quote from Dario: https://bsky.app/profile/kylierobison.com/post/3lujbtfdzyk2e

“Unfortunately, I think ‘no bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”

I agree, it is hard to run a business on that principle, but I also thought that if any AI company were to aspire to it, it would be Anthropic.

There are huge differences in principle and practice between "no bad person should benefit" and "we should minimze the number of bad people who benefit and the extent to which they benefit."

The former makes basically anything impossible and whatever you release will be an accession to the latter. I think the only way you can get to "no bad person" is to shut down. The latter means putting in some higher amount of work and continuing to look for ways to reduce the amount of bad enabled or created.

That's true, I am continually learning to temper my idealism, particularly when working in developer tools and education.

I don't understand why any business would endeavor to not benefit all people. Like, we should expect grocery stores to benefit bad people. We should expect payment processors to benefit bad people. We should expect clothing retailers to benefit bad people. The goal shouldn't be to prevent bad people from benefitting, the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging your business toward their malicious aims. Even the worst people have completely neutral or even benevolent objectives some of the time.

The context of that quote was around finding funding from UAE / Saudi Arabia / etc

If you run a clothing shop you don't need to take investment from bad people. Yes everyone gets to wear the clothes / use the ai model. But that wasn't what he was talking about (and in that same leaked memo was enthusiastic about giving more people access to Claude)

> The context of that quote was around finding funding from UAE / Saudi Arabia / etc If you run a clothing shop you don't need to take investment from bad people.

Are you saying that the UAE and Saudi Arabia investors are bad people and so it is immoral to take funding from them?

That depends on whether or not you think torturing and dismembering a citizen who in your embassy is bad.

Maybe this is just a fundamental moral divide but a lot of people do think it's reasonable for someone to say that a grocery store shouldn't sell guns, or that a payment processor shouldn't process gun sales. Just for one example.

If you love guns, substitute something else you dislike. Currently people are aggressively pushing to prohibit the sale of adult entertainment, for example, and doing so by trying to get payment processors to block those transactions.

It's very common for people to hold the opinion that stores and payment processors should be opinionated as well and discriminate in terms of what they allow to be bought or sold.

And that's completely ignoring the question of how laws governing commerce interact with this. If you do business with a sanctioned entity the government's going to get angry real quick AFAIK, regardless of whether the business was itself harmless.

> the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging your business toward their malicious aims

Someone can wield your product in ways you cannot foresee or even if you can foresee, cannot prevent. Even if you could prevent, it would likely require spying on customers, which I don’t know is the right tradeoff.

arent they being accused of ripping off book data for free tho?

the old sabotage yourself so you can’t accidentally help your enemy trick. When you value your enemy’s pain more than your own happiness.

This is the kind of tech CEO statement that you're not supposed to think about.

> has grown its annualized recurring revenue from $1.4 billion in March 2025 to $3 billion in May

wonder if dario himself came with 'vibe limit and blame users later' strategy. Has to be one of slickest moves in business.

If you are exceptionally talented, work hard, born in the right place and on top of that extremely lucky (and perhaps unlucky with family tragedy). You can do this too! Hats off to him, and its an interesting story, but I could almost read Prince William's story for inspiration too.

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