Dario Amodei

I'm doing so more explicitly and with greater urgency with this essay.

The next step will be convincing the world's thinkers, policymakers, companies, and citizens of the imminence and overriding importance of this issue, that it is worth expending thought and political capital on this in comparison to the thousands of other issues that dominate the news every day.

Then there will be a time for courage, for enough people to buck the prevailing trends and stand on principle, even in the face of threats to their economic interests and personal safety.

The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give.

But in my time as a researcher, leader, and citizen, I have seen enough courage and ability to believe that we can win, that when put in the darkest circumstances, humanity has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail.

We have no time to lose.

I would like to thank Eric Brynjolfsson, Ben Buchanan, Mariana Florentino-Cuellar, Alan Defoe, Kevin Esvelt, Nick Beckstead, Richard Fontaine, Jim McClave, and very many of the staff at Anthropic for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay.

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This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for less wrong.

It was published on January 26, 2026.

The original text contained 92 footnotes which were omitted from the narration.

I prefer Demis's timeline.

I wish we had five to 10 years, you know, so it's possible he's just right and I'm just wrong, but assume I'm right and it can be done in one to two years.

Why can't we slow down to Demis's timeline?

Well, you could just slow down.

Well, no, but the reason we can't do that is because we have...

geopolitical adversaries building the same technology at a similar pace, it's very hard to have an enforceable agreement where they slow down and we slow down.

And so if we can just

If we can just not sell the chips, then this isn't a question of competition between the US and China.

This is a question of competition between me and Demis, which I'm very confident that we can work out.