The big AI news over the weekend was the debate over Dario Amodei's lengthy post on X defending Anthropic's approach to both regulation and talking about AI's many risks. Amodei, who rarely appears on the Elon Musk-controlled social media platform, made the post in response to comments investor Gavin Baker made on the "All In" podcast, which is cohosted by former Trump AI czar David Sacks—himself no fan of Anthropic. The clash pits two high-profile figures against each other: Amodei cofounded Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, in 2021 alongside other former OpenAI researchers, and the company counts Amazon and Google among its major backers. Sacks, a venture capitalist, served as President Donald Trump's first White House AI and crypto "czar," championing a light-touch approach to AI oversight—an orientation shared by the administration, which on its first day in office rescinded former President Joe Biden's 2023 executive order on AI, which had called on developers of the largest models to share safety-test results with the government.

A "maximalist" vision and "regulatory capture"

Baker said that he'd been told "by multiple people I trust" that Amodei had said that Anthropic was so confident of both AI's potential and his company's position at the forefront of AI development that "Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point." Baker described this as evidence of Anthropic's "maximalist" vision, in which only it and the U.S. government decided who could access super powerful AI.

Sacks called the notion "hubristic" and repeated his claims that Amodei's strategy is "regulatory capture"—where Anthropic uses fear of AI's risks to persuade the government to enact stringent regulation on the technology that only Anthropic can easily comply with, eliminating competition from other AI startups or open-source models.

Baker went on to criticize Amodei for fueling the public's overwhelmingly negative perception of AI, a factor that has played into opposition to data center construction around the U.S. Baker worries this negativity is making business difficult for AI companies and also fears it will imperil American leadership in the technology. He called on Amodei to present a more positive image of AI.

Amodei hits back

Anthropic denies Amodei ever said anything like what Baker claims. "Complete and utter nonsense," Sasha de Marigny, Anthropic's chief brand and communications officer, replied on X. (Sacks later pointed out that Amodei himself did not directly address Baker's claim.)

Meanwhile, Amodei posted on X that he thinks Silicon Valley libertarians such as Baker tend to see all regulation as slowing technology down and resulting in regulatory capture, whereas others "outside of this bubble" see regulation as constraining corporate power and benefitting "ordinary people." Amodei said he thought both positions oversimplified things and that "it's complicated and really depends on what the 'regulation' consists of."

Amodei said Anthropic tries "very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors." He noted that many of the regulations it has favored either contained specific exemptions for companies below a certain revenue threshold or that spent less than a certain amount on model training, or were designed only to apply to cutting-edge models, while exempting less-capable ones. That design is already reflected in one state law: California's SB 53, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2025, applies its safety-framework, transparency, and critical-incident reporting requirements only to models trained above high thresholds—more than 10^26 operations of compute or, as determined by state officials, $100 million in training compute—leaving smaller developers exempt.

He said he did believe AI naturally tended to concentrate economic power, because of the compute requirements to train and serve powerful AI models, but that this was very different from saying that only one or a few companies would exist in the future. Open source models, he said, only partly addressed this concentration of power, since they still required compute to train and run. He said he favored "rules of the road" that would "leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring."

As for Baker's criticism that his own statements were responsible for turning the public against AI, Amodei said, "I don't think [the public's negative view of AI] is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI's risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust." He said he didn't think the AI industry could win back that trust with "a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin." Instead, he said AI companies actually had to deliver on the positive benefits of AI—such as actually curing cancer.

"I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world," he wrote. "That is totally on us, and I think it's the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing."

A DMV for AI? What's wrong with that?

Amodei's post resulted in lots more back-and-forth between critics and defenders on X. On the regulation point, Sacks wrote that creating any kind of regulatory agency for AI—he called it "a DMV for AI"—would hobble the U.S. tech sector, "create long queues as AI models wait for testing and approval" and "handicap the U.S. relative to China, which will not adopt the same constraints." Sacks also wrote that "Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize." Sacks' warning echoes arguments U.S. tech executives have made against the European Union's AI Act, whose obligations for general-purpose models began taking effect in August 2025 amid complaints that compliance burdens would advantage less-regulated rivals. And the question of who sets U.S. AI rules sharpened after the Senate voted 99-1 in July 2025 to strip a proposed five-year moratorium on state AI laws from Trump's signature tax-and-spending bill—leaving states free to legislate even as Washington has yet to pass a comprehensive federal AI law.

The columnist's view

Writing in Fortune's Eye on AI newsletter, author Jeremy Kahn offers his own take: that Amodei is right to call out the false dichotomy in Sacks' AI regulation narrative. As Stuart Russell, the UC Berkeley computer scientist, frequently quips, a sandwich shop in San Francisco has to comply with more regulation than OpenAI or Anthropic. That became less true after the passage of California's state-level law on frontier AI last year, Kahn notes, but it is still true at the federal level.

Does regulation somewhat limit the number of restaurants? Sure, Kahn writes—but there is still plenty of competition, with more than 3,000 restaurants in San Francisco. Larger restaurant chains probably do have an easier time complying with the rules: there are some economies of scale to compliance, and the big chains have lobbying muscle and political connections that most mom-and-pop shops don't. But the public is better served by having food safety regulations, labor regulation, and product liability laws rather than none, he argues.

The same goes for the auto industry, in Kahn's view. For all of Sacks' maligning of the DMV, most people support the idea of licensing drivers and periodically inspecting vehicles to make sure they are road-worthy. There is some concentration in the auto industry, but regulation is not the primary reason.

As for the idea that regulation sets the U.S. back in a technological race with China, Kahn points out that China already has some AI laws—around data labeling and identifying AI-generated content—that are stricter than those in the U.S. He adds that if what the U.S. cares about is the national security implications of powerful AI, it could exempt models developed specifically for national security purposes from the rules, although he considers this probably a bad idea, citing WarGames or Terminator. It is useful to remember, he writes, that the U.S. managed to win the Cold War while also having fairly strict regulation around the manufacture and transport of nuclear material—and he is not sure that having safety rules around the development of frontier AI should be any different.

Also in this edition of Eye on AI

• OpenAI details two week training pause, more security controls following Hugging Face hack
• Anthropic on course for $65 billion in annual revenue.
• OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for teens.
• Can AI models figure out the rules of the game?

A note from the author

Kahn writes that he is just back from three weeks of vacation, and thanks his colleagues Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini for holding down the fort while he was away. For much of that time, he was engaged in outdoor activities—camping, hiking, kayaking, fishing, running, and swimming—or indoor ones that are not digitally mediated, such as dining out with family or listening to live entertainment. His family did sometimes use Google Search to look stuff up, and the AI-summarized answers it provided were often impressively detailed and accurate—definitely more convenient than having to hunt for information across multiple web pages. But that, he writes, is about where his interaction with AI started and stopped. Overall, the three-week break was a refreshing reminder of all the ways in which AI has not transformed society and, hopefully, never will.

The latest episode of Fortune's AI Weekly vodcast features Bea Nolan and Emily Forlini discussing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 6,000-word manifesto and leadership changes at OpenAI, plus a conversation with Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika about the startup's $13.3 billion valuation and $400 million Series C funding round.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.