Toward the end of last year, notable AI insiders were expressing skepticism about the path ahead for research, and a financial bubble had become a topic of open conversation, even among implicated CEOs. Soon, though, updates to some major models would shift the industry’s focus again: Suddenly, they were *much* better at writing software. A lot of the surge in enthusiasm for AI coding was driven by Claude Code, a product built by Anthropic, a company that long ago bet on automating the tech industry as its path to making money. This meant attention for Anthropic and also for its co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei. Now, he had the industry’s mic. He wanted to talk about Claude Code, sure. More than that, though, he wanted to talk about how he thinks things might go very, very wrong. He does this a lot. In 2024, Amodei published “Machines of Loving Grace,” a long, cautiously optimistic, and widely read essay about the possibilities of what he termed “powerful AI.” This week, he published a follow-up, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which is unapologetically intended as a warning about what might happen along the path to prosperity, positioned as an attempt to “confront the rite of passage itself” and outline the “risks that we are about to face.” Read John Herrman on how Amodei warns about the technology and ideologies of the future, but he seems most distressed about the politics of today: