Anthropic CEO likens AI fight with China to Cold War, seeks 'disarmament negotiations'

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Sunday compared the U.S.-China artificial intelligence (AI) race to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, warning both nations must manage the threat of "potential destruction" from each other.

Amodei, who previously published an essay on Saturday warning about AI efforts outpacing human capabilities to control the technology, reiterated his concerns to "CBS Sunday Morning" that AI could potentially threaten mankind if left unchecked. He encouraged efforts to slow down production, but CBS correspondent Jo Ling Kent asked him whether that was the best solution to compete with China.

Amodei acknowledged that it was a tough "dilemma" for the U.S. but suggested that part of the solution could be to open discussions with China as the U.S. did with the Soviet Union.

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"It's not in any government's interest to have bioterrorism," Amodei said. "And so we should talk with the Chinese and see if we can work together to put limits to put a speed limit on the rate of this technology."

"It's a little bit like, you know, for all our differences with, you know, other systems of government and I have many — I generally have a hawkish position on China —but for all our differences, think about when it was the U.S. and the Soviet Union, right?" he continued. "And we each had 10,000 nuclear missiles pointed at each other. Even for all our differences, we recognized that that was too many, that we needed to engage in talks that could lower the scale of the potential destruction."

Kent asked whether he believed the Cold War should be used as a model for the AI arms race.

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"I didn't say we should use the Cold War as a model...disarmament negotiations like arms limitation, I do think that is an appropriate lens through which to think about this at the geopolitical level," Amodei said. "If we look at what AI models can do in terms of cyber, like they absolutely have geopolitical and national security significance. Of course, they do. That's why we're having this whole conversation."

Fox News Digital reached out to Anthropic for comment.

Amodei's essay drew support from high-profile tech executives such as SpaceX CEO and xAI founder Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. However, other tech experts and entrepreneurs disagreed with his essay, either because of his concerns or his suggestions.

Former White House AI "czar" David Sacks pushed back against AI warnings like Amodei's, including a viral post from former Anthropic staffer Jacob Coxon.

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"[The warnings are] designed to scare the public about AI so that these NGOs can implement their preferred approach to AI, which is a government takeover," Sacks told "Special Report" on Thursday.

Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo responded to Amodei's essay on "Fox News Live" Saturday, arguing that voluntary industry measures might not be enough to prevent advanced systems from escaping human control.

"After they've accumulated all of the hard power in the world, they run the factories, they're integrated into the military, you know, they're sort of running the whole system, and humans are just sort of giving them orders," Kokotajlo said. "Then they stop taking orders at some points, and they kill off the humans."