Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against the claim that his warnings about AI dangers have fueled a backlash against the industry.

Responding to investor Gavin Baker, who argued on the All-In podcast and X that Amodei’s messaging was disproportionately negative and that he should be a more positive advocate, Amodei disagreed.

He said his writing has been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits” and pointed to his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” as an effort to paint an inspiring picture of AI’s potential.

While acknowledging that the public has a negative view of AI, Amodei rejected the idea that this is primarily caused by AI leaders warning about risks.

Instead, he called it “fundamentally a crisis of trust” that has been building for decades—ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry, and the AI backlash is “just the latest iteration of it.

” He added that the most accurate criticism of AI companies is that they haven’t yet delivered on big promises to benefit the world.

On regulation, Amodei argued that Baker presented a false choice between no regulation and concentration of power via regulatory capture.

He noted that many outside the Silicon Valley bubble see regulation as constraining corporate power, and that Anthropic tries to make proposals that disadvantage frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors.

The exchange was published by TechCrunch, drawing from Amodei’s public posts on X.