Artificial intelligence deployed at war: What happened to finding a cure for cancer?

It has been almost six decades since American writer Joan Didion wrote a devastating critique of the hippie counterculture movement after months of reporting in San Francisco. She painted a picture of a community morally adrift and in the thrall of LSD.

The hipsters she met turned out to be anything but hip and mostly deluded.Using similar reporting techniques of deep immersion into the now mainstream world of artificial intelligence, Vanity Fair’s long story this month on Anthropic and the AI industry in California’s Bay Area rings some alarm bells about AI and our future. The writer Joe Hagan, mixing a satirical style with interviews of people at Anthropic and other companies, reveals that for all the claims that in a few years AI will have created minds with the intelligence of Nobel laureates, not much thinking has been done about guardrails to protect us from the risk of AI running amok.The article focuses on Anthropic, usually the default good guy in discussions on this subject.

That this AI startup is in a legal battle with the Trump administration since late last month after being absurdly designated a “supply chain risk to national security” adds to the halo around it. Its charismatic CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, the company’s president, often riff on how the company’s flagship product might in time cure cancer or polio.

“In terms of pure intelligence,” Dario Amodei wrote in his lengthy essay, Machines of Loving Grace, AI would soon be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields—biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.” How soon, he was asked in a podcast. This year or next was his reply.

His sister Daniela sounds even more the perpetual tech optimist. In a recent