Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: AI's biotech revolution may take a decade to materialise

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The most convincing thing Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said to me during an on-stage conversation last week was that perhaps his original vision of how AI would change biotech might not start to be visible for a decade.

In a 2024 essay, “ Machines of Loving Grace , ” Amodei had argued that artificial intelligence, and in particular large language models like Anthropic’s Claude, could allow researchers to make what we think of as a decade’s worth of progress every year, covering a century in a decade. Now he admits we’re not there yet.

“I don’t think that today we can make progress at a rate of ten years per year for a number of reasons,” Amodei said. Those included: Models aren’t as good as they someday will be; researchers need time to figure out how to use these tools; and the infrastructure and regulatory systems will take time to change.

Amodei and I were speaking at an Anthropic event where the company, a public-benefit corporation meant to be focused on improving the world, unveiled a product for biologists and pharmaceutical companies called Claude Science . I agreed to interview Amodei on-stage as part of the event, with the stipulation that I would decide on my own what to ask.

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