Astral Codex Ten

Dario Amodei

8 min read

Dario Amodei

Article

Dario Amodei is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between May 20, 2021 and March 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “most of OpenAI’s top alignment researchers, including Dario Amodei”; “The top signatures are Dario Amodei”; “I can’t tell if CEO Dario Amodei is an EA or not”. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, Sam Altman.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: May 20, 2021
  • Last seen: March 01, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
35: Recent news in local AI alignment research space: most of OpenAI’s top alignment researchers, including Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, Jack Clark, and Paul Christano, left en masse for poorly-understood reasons (see speculation here). Dario Amodei is now working with a new nonprofit called Cooperative AI Foundation. Paul Christiano will be founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center (conflict of interest notice: I know Paul and think he is generally great); see also his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here. Unrelatedly, local secretive AI alignment research group MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) is leaving the Bay Area for some small town with affordable land prices where they can maybe build a campus (they’re still trying to decide exactly where).
Inline links: left en masse for poorly-understood reasons, here, Cooperative AI Foundation, Alignment Research Center, his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here, leaving the Bay Area
Links For May 2023
June 01, 2023 · Original source
Can’t even list all the new people who have come out as AI x-risk believers, but you can just read the CAIS statement. The top signatures are Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei; aside from the usual suspects, they also have Bruce Schneier (computer security expert) , Dawn Song (computer scientist and security expert), Andy Clark (professor of cognitive philosophy, wrote Surfing Uncertainty), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he didn't sign the last one because he disagreed with specifics, but he's here), and a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense.
Inline links: CAIS statement
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
The founders of Anthropic included several EAs (I can’t tell if CEO Dario Amodei is an EA or not). The original investors included Dustin Moskowitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jaan Tallinn, and various EA organizations. Its Wikipedia article says that “Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement”. Anthropic is controlled by a board of trustees, most of whose members are effective altruists.
Inline links: board of trustees
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Jorge Bastos, $70K, for AI that curates bio datasets. There are exabytes (= 1 billion gigabytes) of high quality biology data; most of it goes unused because it’s not compatible with other datasets or tools. Jorge’s startup, Covalent, uses AI to put these in standard machine-readable format. At the very least, this would save biologists thousands of hours per year; in a best-case scenario, it could bring forward the golden age of AI-assisted biology predicted by people like Dario Amodei.
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Dario Amodei is the first co-founder. “Dario” comes from the Persian “Darius” meaning “Lord”. “Amodei” is of unclear meaning, but I cannot help but notice the resemblance with Asmodei (also called Ashmodei, Hamadee, Æshmadæva, and Asmodeus), a demon-king mentioned in the book of Tobit. Plausibly all these different names derive from a Proto-Sumerian root *Amodei, in which case the meaning of “Dario Amodei” would be “Asmodeus is lord”. This is a name of blasphemy.
Inline links: meaning, Asmodei
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
January 02, 2026 · Original source
Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.
Inline links: #43 here
You have only X years to escape being permanently boring when the weight of galactic humanity descends to scrutinize your life forever. Ten million years from now, do you want transhuman intelligences on a Niven Ring somewhere in Dario Amodei’s supercluster to briefly focus their deific gaze on your legacy and think “Yeah, he spent the whole hinge of history making B2B SAAS products because he was afraid of ‘joining the permanent underclass’, now he has a moon 20% bigger than the rest of us?” Or do you want them to think “She was one of the heroes who arose when the fate of humanity balanced on a knife’s edge, fought against the thousand forms of entropy that could have ended our paradise before it began, helped create a vision of broad-based prosperity that benefitted all humanity, and gets 0.000038501% of the credit for our current happy state. We grant her the rank of Forebear, and the Ancestor Veneration And Simulation Collective has built a megacathedral to her memory three star systems over”?
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
If you don’t put away $25,000, then in order to stay equally well-off you only need for 1% (industrial scale) to 0.0001% (solar scale) of wealth to be redistributed through some combination of private charity and government welfare. Currently about 2% of income is redistributed via charity, and 25% via government (in the US). I glossed this as “you can get a moon in one of Dario Amodei’s galaxies”, and people had strong opinions on that exact example, but many people getting rich in AI have expressed interest in post-singularity charity, and I expect the 0.0001% - 1% target to be reached.
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
31: Related: Dario Amodei essay on The Adolescence of Technology. Mixed reactions from Zvi, Ryan, Oliver, and Transformer. This and the framing of their recent “Hot Mess” paper seem like Anthropic trying to distance themselves from concerns about systematically misaligned and power-seeking AI in favor of an “industrial accident” threat model. I don’t know if this is their heartfelt position based on all the extra private evidence they no doubt have by now, a well-intentioned PR attempt to sanewash themselves and sell alignment to a doomer-skeptical government/public, part of a balance between more and less doomerish factions, or a newly-ultra-successful tech company learning to talk its book, but it doesn’t line up with what the smartest people I know conclude using the public evidence, and it makes me nervous. I think Jan Leike’s post above does a better job balancing the reassuringness of the current evidence for the tractability of the infrahuman regime vs. the fact that we still don’t know what happens around highly-effective agency and superintelligence.
Inline links: Dario Amodei essay on The Adolescence of Technology, Zvi, Ryan, Oliver, Transformer, the framing of their recent “Hot Mess” paper
"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
This is currently a “lawful use” of AI, and one of the ones Dario Amodei’s letter says that he’s worried about. As far as we can tell, Altman’s contract with the Department of War doesn’t contain any provisions preventing them from using ChatGPT this way.
Inline links: Dario Amodei’s letter says