Amodei, what are you smoking?

I just finished Dario’s latest essay and it is well written as always but I cannot shake the feeling that I am reading a battle plan for a war that has already been lost. Amodei is not naive enough to think democracies are immune to corruption because he explicitly warns that we must draw hard internal red lines to prevent AI being turned against citizens. The tragedy is that he still writes as if the institutions that must draw and enforce those lines are stable. They are not. The core assumption doing hidden work throughout the essay is that the US state will function as a check on power rather than a hoarder of it and the last few months have made that assumption look like wishful thinking rather than a governance plan.

The brutal truth is that the surgical and evidence based regulation Amodei calls for is being actively dismantled by the very people he expects to enforce it. On December 11 2025 President Trump signed the order ensuring a national policy framework for artificial intelligence and it treats state by state safety experimentation as an obstacle to speed. It shifts the federal posture from partnership to preemption. The administration has established a litigation task force with the sole responsibility of challenging state laws that try to impose safety standards. They are not treating safety as a technical necessity but as a form of ideological bias that slows down American dominance. Amodei writes about a race to the top where democracies build safer systems but the White House is currently running a race where safety is treated as treason against the economy.

Amodei envisions a world where a coalition of democracies uses powerful AI to protect freedom and enforce norms. He underestimates what happens when the coalition leader treats federal preemption as a virtue and local safety rules as sabotage. The executive order explicitly prioritizes speed and measures against ideological bias over the precautionary principles that Anthropic claims to value. We are not seeing a government that wants to thoughtfully manage the adolescence of technology. We are seeing a government that wants to strip away impediments to acceleration creating the exact conditions under which control seeking actors can repurpose national competitiveness into a mandate for consolidation.

The most dangerous part of the essay is that it inadvertently provides cover for this recklessness. When Amodei argues that the free world must reach AGI first to stop authoritarians he hands a blank check to an administration that views regulation as weakness. He asks for a scalpel to carve out safety but the government has picked up a sledgehammer to smash the guardrails. If the mechanism for safety is the rule of law and the executive branch is systematically weakening legal oversight then the plan has no foundation.

We are trapped in a room where the structural integrity of the building is failing just as we turn on the heavy machinery. Amodei hopes that the United States will remain a safe harbor for this technology because of our constitutional history but history is being rewritten by executive fiat. The red lines he says we must draw are being erased by a mandate for acceleration. We are not entering a rite of passage for humanity. We are handing a godlike power to a political apparatus that has just legally formalized its hostility to restraint. Amodei is betting on a version of the American government that became politically unreliable as an enforcement mechanism last December.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” — James Madison

Brutal truth: We are building godlike machines in a moment when we cannot even rely on ordinary humans in power to obey ordinary limits, and the entire safety story collapses the second that premise fails.