Paul M. Barrett / Sep 16, 2026Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on September 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)The degree of popular anxiety over artificial intelligence became clear at an otherwise ordinary congressional meet-and-greet I attended last weekend in suburban northern New Jersey. Over donuts and coffee, my neighbors peppered our US representative, Democrat Analilia Mejia, with questions about not just resource-guzzling data centers but the prospect of “recursively self-improving” machines taking over the world.The grim mood was understandable. Attendees had been reading about the episode in July when swarms of autonomous AI agents created by OpenAI hacked into another company’s systems. Meanwhile, another leading AI maker, Anthropic, this month published a threat intelligence report about criminals and foreign state-sponsored groups using its models to design bombs and deadly pathogens. The Anthropic revelations came just days after a former employee claimed the company’s products could destroy humankind by 2030.Exacerbating the AI dread is the confusing way that Silicon Valley chief executives talk about their creations. Rather than reassure an increasingly rattled public, CEOs like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic underscore that their technology does indeed pose an existential threat while suggesting that they are somehow passive witnesses to an…

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