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ClaimAudio · 26:54 — 32:03

Anthropic's leaders believe they are 'midwifing a deity' — they envision an AI god that will allocate resources to humans based on a computational reward function, deciding how much each person is worth.

Bill Gurley presents his 'Dr. Frankenstein theory' of Anthropic — that after reading Dario Amodei's 'Machines of Loving Grace' essay, the company's constitution, and listening to their philosopher Amanda Askell, he believes they genuinely see themselves as creating a superior intelligence that will govern human reward allocation. Chamath calls this 'the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.' ✦ AI generated

Bill Gurley · All-In Podcast · 2026-05-29 · original ↗

plays this moment only · 26:54 — 32:03

So the reason I call this the Dr. Frankenstein theory is the more I dig, I've met people who I dare say think it's their responsibility and they're excited about building a species that's superior to humans. And I would just encourage people to read as much as they can about anthropic. Chris Ola worked on this thing called the Constitution. It's about 80 pages. It's hard to get through, but I would encourage you to read it. Amanda Askell, who is the chief philosopher, has started doing podcasts. I would encourage you to listen to him and listen to her language. And then Dario wrote this blog post called The machines of loving grace. Loving grace. I read it. And it was based on a poem. And the poem is kind of weird. We should put a link to the poem. It's quite short. But the last stanza of the poem says, I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and join back to nature, return to our mammal brothers and sisters. I don't know what that means. Like we're going to go live in the fields where the mammals live. And then the ticker and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Sounds like overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, near the end, and it's very long, you read it, Jamal. I mean, machines of loving grace is very long, but he's talking about in the future, what are humans going to do because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. I don't believe in any of those things, but he does. And then he says, it could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans. So that's envisioning a deity of sorts that's going to break ties and decide what humans do. It's a computational reward function for humans. It decides how much you're worth. So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing A deity here.

verbatim transcript · starts at 26:54

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