WORK
The Adolescence of Technology
Amodei's January 2026 essay warning that AI could create personal fortunes in the trillions for a powerful few and that the concentration of power in the AI industry was historically unprecedented — the structural counterweight to Machines of Loving Grace.
'The Adolescence of Technology' is Amodei's January 2026 essay confronting the structural risks that could prevent the positive possibilities of AI from being realized. Where the earlier 'Machines of Loving Grace' outlined positive futures, this essay addressed the concentration of power that might foreclose them. Amodei writes bluntly that AI-enabled authoritarianism terrifies him: the same technology that could accelerate scientific research and democratize expertise could be used to build surveillance systems of unprecedented sophistication, propaganda systems of unprecedented persuasiveness, and control systems that could monitor and manipulate populations at a scale previous authoritarian regimes could not have imagined. The essay is accompanied by a pledge: Amodei and Anthropic's six co-founders committed to donating eighty percent of their wealth.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay's central diagnostic is that AI is dual-use in the deepest sense: every capability that could serve human flourishing could