There's a short list of things Sam Altman and Dario Amodei agree on. It doesn't take long to read.
The two men have been rivals since Amodei, along with several colleagues, left OpenAI in 2021 to found Anthropic — a company whose entire reason for existing was, in part, to do AI differently than Altman's organisation. Since then, they've built the two most powerful and closely-watched AI companies on the planet, raced each other to release frontier models, and competed for the same talent, the same investors, and the same cultural oxygen. They are not, to put it gently, each other's biggest fans.
So when both of them — alongside Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI — co-signed a public letter to the United States Congress, it was worth pausing on. Not because letters to Congress are unusual. Plenty of tech CEOs write them. But because this one contained a sentence that almost no one is talking about, even though it might be the most important line in the whole document.
The letter describes the act of Altman and Amodei signing the same piece of paper as "a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds."
They said the quiet part out loud. These men, who have spent years positioning their companies as existential competitors, looked at this particular issue and decided that whatever their differences, this was not the moment to be subtle. The issue in question: using AI to help bad actors — or rogue states, or anyone with a dark enough imagination — synthesise biological materials that could be used to create weapons of mass destruction.
The letter calls for government screening of the buying and selling of synthetic DNA and biological materials that could be weaponised.
That's the surface story. But the deeper one is more unsettling.
