Claude comfort
Anthropic’s Canberra roadshow was less about its AI model Claude than a far more important product: a close relationship with the Australian state.
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen! The circus is in town! Dario Amodei, the CEO and founder of AI lab and software market sledgehammer Anthropic, made a pit stop in Canberra during his Down Under tour, selling the political establishment on his trademark blend of optimism and doom.
Speaking at the Futures Forum in Parliament House before an audience of roughly 150 people, Amodei made his well-tested pitch: AI will likely be very good for humanity in various ways, and very bad in others, and Anthropic is right there at the frontier trying to figure it out with the rest of us.
“The fundamental challenge remains: we know much less than we would like to, but the technology is moving faster than we’d like it,” Amodei told those assembled. “So we have to act, but we’re not sure how to act.”
Ahead of the address, Anthropic announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Australian government, indicating that it was ready to move in lockstep on AI safety, workforce impacts and data centre investment.
