There are two separate questions regarding Dario Amodei’s post about AI and biology: motivation and reality.
Motivation. Dario started in biology (was a PhD student of the great Bill Bialek). It might be that the master plan really was to first build much more capable AI systems, and eventually use them to cure diseases. Maybe coding models, chatbots, Claude Code, etc. were never the final destination. They were the road toward models capable of becoming genuinely useful scientific collaborators.
It might also be that there was no master plan at all. Anthropic spent years pushing the frontier in coding and general reasoning; those systems have now become much more capable, and this is simply a good moment to turn more attention toward biology.
Maybe, but there is also a more cynical interpretation:
“Curing cancer” is an extraordinarily powerful form of reputation laundering.
They are basically saying: "Yes, we are perhaps creating the largest concentration of technological and economic power in modern history."
Yes, we want governments to restrict who can build and access the most powerful versions of this technology.
Yes, ordinary people increasingly have less visibility into what the frontier systems can do.
But don’t worry - we’re the good guys! We are going to cure cancer.
And this is where I disagree with Dario’s claim that “the thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”
Suppose Anthropic really does help cure a major cancer. That would be an extraordinary achievement, but curing cancer would not answer the question of who should control AI.
A company can create enormous social value and simultaneously accumulate too much power.
The pharmaceutical industry itself is a good example. Creating life-saving drugs doesn’t automatically resolve questions about pricing, access, lobbying, competition, data rights or public accountability.
And there is another problem with the biology story.
I am very bullish about AI for science. We’ve discussed AI drug discovery and related areas several times on our podcast. AI can accelerate literature review, target discovery, protein and molecule design, experimental planning, analysis, and many other parts of the pipeline.
But biology is not software.
You can make an AI reason 100x faster. You cannot simply make a human body respond to a drug 100x faster.
Wet-lab experiments take physical time. Toxicity takes time to observe. Human trials take time. Long-term side effects take time. Diseases are heterogeneous. Manufacturing, recruitment and validation happen in the physical world. AI can remove some bottlenecks, but not all of them.
Also, if these models really have a plausible path to curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, hepatitis and other diseases, then “pacing AI progress” has a cost too.
If delaying frontier AI by a year delays a cure by a year, that isn’t an abstract opportunity cost. People die during that year.
And of course the most important question that I think Dario’s post doesn’t answer:
Who gets to decide who may use intelligence, whose data may be used, and for what purpose?
Because almost every “safety” policy has a political economy.
If the outcome is consistently:
Anthropic gets more control,
frontier models become less accessible,
customers have fewer choices,
smaller competitors face higher compliance costs,
and governments become increasingly dependent on a handful of frontier labs to tell them what is safe…
Then it's rational for people to ask whether every restriction is only about safety.
That question remains legitimate even if everyone at Anthropic is acting in complete good faith (Are they?)
Maybe people aren’t distrusting AI because they don’t understand how wonderful the future could be.
Maybe they distrust a future in which a tiny number of companies build enormously powerful systems, tell everyone else how dangerous those systems are, lobby for rules governing who gets access to them and then ask society to trust that the companies controlling them are the right people to decide.
If Anthropic helps cure cancer, I will be the first to applaud.
But “we cured cancer” is an argument for AI's value. It is not an argument for concentrating control of AI.
