Quote · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Anthropic's Digital God, Pope vs AI, Job Loss Narrative Flips, Open Source Crackdown Coming?
Where this was said
Anthropic's Digital God: Do they believe they are creating a superior species?
At 30:13 · chapter starts 26:57
Bill Gurley opens with a 130-year history lesson: Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical warned that the Industrial Revolution would devastate workers. [2] — Bill Gurley "Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical warned the Industrial Revolution would harm humanity. Since then, real wages rose 8–10x, global poverty fell fro…" 25:00 What followed was the workweek shrinking from 60+ hours to 34, real wages rising 8–10x, global GDP per capita growing from $1,500 to $20,000, child labor in the US dropping from 18% to zero, and global poverty falling from 75% to under 10%. Leo XIII, Gurley flatly states, 'got it dead wrong.' [2] — Bill Gurley "Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical warned the Industrial Revolution would harm humanity. Since then, real wages rose 8–10x, global poverty fell fro…" 25:00 But Gurley's real bombshell is his 'Dr. Frankenstein theory' of Anthropic. [1] — Bill Gurley "Gurley argues Anthropic isn't building software — they're midwifing a deity. After reading Chris Olah's 'Constitution,' Amanda Askill's pod…" 30:13 After exhaustively reading Chris Olah's 'The Constitution,' listening to chief philosopher Amanda Askill's podcasts, and parsing Dario Amodei's 'Machines of Loving Grace' — a blog post inspired by a poem envisioning humanity 'watched over by machines of loving grace' — Gurley concludes that Anthropic's leadership doesn't believe it is writing software. It believes it is midwifing a deity: a superior species that will govern a post-labor economy by distributing resources to humans through an AI-determined reward function. [1] — Bill Gurley "Gurley argues Anthropic isn't building software — they're midwifing a deity. After reading Chris Olah's 'Constitution,' Amanda Askill's pod…" 30:13 Chamath reduces this to its essence — 'a computational reward function for humans that decides how much you're worth' — and frames it as a dystopian Black Mirror scenario. Jason calls it the ultimate narcissism: believing you can create God.
Gurley argues Anthropic isn't building software — they're midwifing a deity. After reading Chris Olah's 'Constitution,' Amanda Askill's podcasts, and Dario's 'Machines of Loving Grace' essay, Gurley concluded that Anthropic's leadership genuinely believes they are building a superior species that will allocate resources to humans via a computational reward function.
Chamath frames Anthropic's doomerism and lobbying as optimal game theory: get 3–4 players in a room, dominate them, and then write the rules for an oversight body too technically outmatched to push back. The goal is to make the regulator your ally and your competitor's obstacle.
Jason Calacanis introduces a new concept: 'intelligence sovereignty.' Privacy was about protecting your data from being read. Intelligence sovereignty is about preventing AI from analyzing everything you do and then telling you how to interpret the world. Open-source AI running on local hardware is the only viable defense.
