Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admits his company is making compromises with authoritarian regimes in the race to build advanced AI.

“Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” Amodei wrote in an internal Slack message to staff, obtained by WIRED. “This is a real downside and I’m not thrilled about it.”

Amodei acknowledged that Anthropic will seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, even though this would “enrich dictators.” Previously, Amodei had argued that “Democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.” Explaining the shift, he pointed to the vast amounts of capital available in the Middle East: “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more. If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”