Monologue: Shut The F*ck Up, Dario!

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron delivers a simple message: if Dario Amodei truly believes that Anthropic is building dangerous AI, he should stop any and all cybersecurity model training runs, halt his IPO, limit Claude to only the safest possible functions, or shut the fuck up. Anthropic “80% gross margins” story https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f002?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Overcharging story: theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/anthropic-customers-find-errant-charges-auditing-startup-says Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 4:06Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 4:18Ed Zitron?

  I wanted to do a more reasonable monologue, one where I carefully pick apart the AI safety debate, skewering the fact that nobody seems to actually be talking about making things safer or curtailing the actual harms of LLMs. But I reached the point where the only thing I wanted to say was that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, needs to shut the fuck up. Dario Amodei, you have spent years threatening people's livelihoods, suggesting that AI would wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs. And when one of your nasty little rationalist goblins quits your company and scares everybody, you've doubled down, saying that for too long, the industry lied about AI's risks without saying what they were, just that progress is fast and we've hit an exponential. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up.

• 5:02Ed Zitron?

  You build cloud software. You're in full control of what gets built or not. Just because you don't fully understand how LLMs make their decisions doesn't mean they're out of control or have their own intentions. And your unwillingness to explain the difference and further fuel anthropomorphism only makes me more certain that you need to shut your fucking mouth. I read in the Financial Times that you're telling investors that you have 80% gross margins if you leave out the cost of training, the revenue share with Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and stock-based compensation, to which I have to say, shut the fuck up, Dario. Shut the fuck up. I am sick of it. I am sick of hearing these fucking stories where you miss the people about your company, about your economics and about your damn software. You make cloud software. Shut the fuck up, man.

• 5:47Ed Zitron?

  You are running your company in a slimy, dishonest and nasty way, conning investors and the general public with the full knowledge that the tech and business media won't bother to push back. How about the fact that you're constantly changing the rate limits on your users' subscriptions? Or that there are changeable reports that Anthropic overcharges its customers? Does that matter to you? God, no. You know it doesn't. You've created a cult of personality on top of the actual cult that exists within your company, an Arnold Palmer of effective altruism and rationalist types. Why is your name in Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfiction? That's super strange. You're a strange guy, Dario. I realize that as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, you probably don't hear direct

• 6:30Ed Zitron?

  feedback like this very often, so let me repeat myself. Shut the fuck up. You make cloud software that's both unprofitable and unreliable. While it's got better, I'll absolutely say that, I don't really give a fucking shit. You've made all of these promises over $500 billion worth. You've told people that you're birthing the machine god. You are not birthing the machine god, Dario, and to act as if you are is either deeply cynical or completely deranged. If you truly believe that you're building dangerous AI, you should treat it as such. Shut down Claude or heavily restrict it so that it can do very little other than the operations you consider completely and utterly safe. But we both know that your definition of safety is entirely aesthetic. You don't give a shit about anyone.

• 7:14Ed Zitron?

  If you did, you'd recognize that you, along with OpenAI and Meta, have allowed your dangerous little chatbots connected to near-infinite resources and some sort of harness to run endless scripts to hack things at scale. And then you have the fucking temerity to try and frame it as if this is AI making its own decisions versus LLMs prompting each other. Again, if you were truly concerned about safety, you'd blow Claude's brains out. You'd annihilate that French motherfucker before he could yell "Allez!" and hack another website. "Non, Monsieur Amodei, I'm just cloud software," he cries. You said, "No, Claude, I'm afraid I'm, I'm afraid you're too dangerous," and send him to hell. The way I know you're in here is that you're not actually taking any meaningful steps

• 7:56Ed Zitron?

  to mitigate the harms of LLMs, nor are you calling for anyone else to do so. You could really easily get a PR win by saying, "Hey, Sam, why does your, why does your LLM make people kill themselves?" Because it's absolutely fucking happening. The quickest step would be to call an immediate halt to any and all cybersecurity model training runs, except you know you can't do that because Mythos is your big sexy enterprise product that multiple sources tell me is just fine and way too expensive. It would be so easy to call out Clammy Sammy and say, "It's time to stop doing these experiments." Except your best idea is to get fucking METR to audit everybody's models. Wow, the independent regulator that you helped get funded, that has multiple former Anthropic

• 8:39Ed Zitron?

  staff on board and is piloted by any number of different "less wrong" posters. You wouldn't get away with this bullshit in any kind of sane or actually rational media climate. You're not a messiah or a prophet or an elder statesman. You're Boris Balkin from the Ninth Gate with $517 billion of cloud commitments and a punch on for waxing lyrical about how you're building the anvil to drop on humanity. You are a deeply boring and annoying man, and I'm tired of hearing you speak. I'm tired of hearing people describe you as intelligent and smart and interesting when you're just another fucking bore. You are rushing your company, which you yourself admit is dangerous, to go public, dumping a firm that burns tens of billions of dollars a year on an unsuspecting public

• 9:21Ed Zitron?

  despite claims that we need to slow down, all while continuing your poisonous tradition of leaking run rates and shenanigan rich financials to journalists that could do and should know better. I also realize this might be the first time you've heard someone talk to you like this in a while. And if that's the case, that's a real shame. I think it would have really helped someone to go, shut the fuck up, Dario. Shut the motherfuck up. I am sick of it. Just someone who honestly, you could pay someone 200 grand, just go, no, shut the fuck up, man. I think it would genuinely improve your company. Hell, I'll do this service for free. Give me your number, man. To my peers who are hearing this and thinking I'm being a little unprofessional, I challenge you to look at the way Anthropic's run its business and how Mr. Amodei conducts himself.

• 10:06Ed Zitron?

  This company has been leaking annualized run rates, undefined snapshots of revenue, never appended to any period of time that you have been quoting as gospel for years, helping to create a deeply deceptive picture of its financial health, all while constantly manipulating its paid subscribers with oscillating rate limits, using you, the media, to sell its software using fear around job loss that is utterly unsubstantiated. On top of it, Mr. Amodei has the temerity to position himself as safety minded and safety conscious as he rushes his company to go public. And many of you are sitting on the sidelines and watching. You don't seem to care. In fact, I think some of you are kind of fucking excited about it. What are you doing? You don't work for these people. Why are you excited? Nothing about this IPO is to do with innovation. Nothing to do with any of

• 10:50Ed Zitron?

  these finances is anything to do with innovation. In fact, I would argue that the innovation is secondary to the financial engineering. Some of you could really do to actually look into this company. If you could pile in anywhere near as much ever as you put in to talking about Jacob Coxon into looking at the numbers, the world might change. And I think that if modern journalism is too delicate to speak about how Anthropic treats its customers and the world at large with clarity, that it is incapable of meeting this moment. And I also realize that the vast majority of you can't say what I'm saying, so I'm gonna say it for you. Dario Amodei, shut the fuck up. Oh, and you too, Sam Altman. The reason I haven't done one of these about you is you're too fucking boring. You go

• 11:34Ed Zitron?

  out there the other day and you're saying, oh, it would be ill timed to take my company public. Yeah, not because of safety, mate. It's because the fucking, the numbers on that company, which I have seen, by the way, and I have so much more than I've actually published. I've got pages of this shit that I've seen. Yeah, the reason that it's not going public is because it looks like a dog's asshole after it ate on Thanksgiving. You should be ashamed of yourself, you little creep. Shut the fuck up, both of you. Anyway, I'll be back next week with Paul Kudrowski to talk about AI, economics. Zitron out.

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