Right now, 75% of Americans are anxious and afraid about AI. People are even bringing their concerns into their therapy sessions, sorting through everything from how AI impacts their jobs to more existential fears about humanity’s future.

These concerns are real. But they’re only part of the story.

To go deeper, I sat down with Daniela Amodei. As president of Anthropic, she is a unique figure in AI. With everyone at the company reporting to her, she is not only a key AI leader, but the most prominent woman leader at a time when the AI conversation is dominated by men. She’s at the forefront of frontier models, but she also studied literature, she played the flute, she’s a mother. She doesn’t just speak tech, she speaks about nature, community, friendship, and self-reflection. 

In my conversation with Daniela, we explore:

• why the discussion about recursive self-improvement has to include humans, not just the machines 
• the dance between humans and AI, and what happens when one partner keeps growing and the other stagnates
• letting AI own intelligence and letting humans own wisdom, and why “Claude can never be your manager, or your therapist, or your partner, or your kids”
• how AI’s power of hyper-personalization can transform health, because health is also about what happens between doctor visits when we improve our daily habits around food, movement, sleep, stress management and connection
• whether AI, unlike social media, can nurture our better angels instead of activating our lesser ones and strengthening the worst in us 

Also:

• why her 5-year-old thinks her job is taking care of an alligator named Claude
• why Leaves of Grass and Yesteryear are both on her nightstand
• why there should never be an AI czar

You can watch our conversation here, and read the interview transcript below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Arianna Huffington  

Daniela, thank you so much for being with us at Think Health. Think Health is of course founded by Alice Walton, who famously brought the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to the Heartland, who built a medical school and a Whole Health Institute and is passionate about the use of AI to improve health. You are of course at the forefront of frontier models, but also you studied literature, you played the flute, you're a mom. You don't just speak tech. You speak about nature and friendship and self-reflection. So we really look forward to exploring these deeper questions together. Thank you.

Daniela Amodei  

Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here.

Arianna Huffington  

So let's start with this moment we are in. Right now, the AI conversation has focused so much on all the risks and the backlash against AI – 75% of people being fearful or anxious and not so much on the benefits. And of course the anxiety is real about jobs, about safety, but do you think also that this anxiety is a proxy for something larger, the fact that suddenly we are going to be not the most intelligent thing on the planet? Is this anxiety about meaning and not just economics? What do you think about that larger existential moment?

Daniela Amodei  

This question is so important because my view of what is sort of happening in this moment is many people are starting to experience both the power of artificial intelligence and are also collectively really starting to think about what are some of the risks? And Anthropic is a little bit unusual because really from our inception, we have had this desire to be very open about both. One of our core cultural values is to hold light and shade, and we think there are real risks that we need to mitigate in order to be able to get to all of the incredible and positive benefits that we think AI will bring about. 

I think a great example, an organization called OpenEvidence uses Claude to help doctors be able to access all of the medical literature in the world. So whether you're a doctor operating in Cleveland or in Ghana, whether you're in a city or in a rural village, you're able to access the entire scope of human knowledge and innovation about whatever medical challenge your patient is facing.

Arianna Huffington  

To come to you, you have been very unusual among AI leaders in speaking a lot about wanting to be self-reflective, about learning from mistakes, about nature, about friendship. And that's kind of unusual because in our social media ecosystem, we are kind of prevented from that self-reflection. It's so easy to spend our lives doom-scrolling or losing ourselves in the rabbit hole of social media. So how can we help people nurture that part that wants to be self-reflective, that wants to reconnect with themselves and what really matters? And can AI with its power of hyper-personalization help with that?

Daniela Amodei  

This is such an important and a very astute question. My personal view is that we're kind of coming off the back of this time in history where technology in the social media age has largely been used to disintermediate humans from one another. Instead of you and I going to have an iced coffee together in person, we're messaging on Snapchat or Instagram. Instead of people going and forming communities in person with the people that live in their neighborhood, they're writing angry comments. What it's led to is a warranted skepticism from people that technology can be used to bring us closer together because I believe that was the promise that was kind of made by these technology companies. 

Arianna Huffington  

And broken.

Daniela Amodei 

That essentially broke those promises. Exactly. At the same time, the way that I think about AI is quite different. AI is not a social mechanism. There are some applications of AI that we think are quite bad, like making AI girlfriends or boyfriends. I think that's a terrible use of AI and people should not do it. And the reason that I think that is because it is another step further down the road of disintermediation of humans being further from one another. A much better world of AI is one in which artificial intelligence is doing a lot of the things that are isolating or lonely activities for humans. They are making us more productive. They're doing work that an AI can do that a human doesn't have to do so that we can spend more time together. So that a doctor, instead of spending time – 10 hours, 15 hours researching what is happening with this patient – I actually have access at my fingertips via Claude and OpenEvidence to say what is happening to this patient so that I can actually spend more time relating to them as a human.

But you can also imagine that socially, it would probably be a better world if we were spending less time interacting with technology and more time interacting with each other.

Arianna Huffington  

And also connecting with ourselves because I studied comparative religion in India and what amazed me is how every spiritual tradition, every religious tradition in the end says the same thing, that we all have this place of wisdom, peace and strength in us. But our current world makes it very hard to reconnect with it. Thich Nhat Hanh said it's never been easier to run away from ourselves. So how can AI be used to help us reclaim time? As you said, a lot of people are saving time by using AI that makes them more productive and then using that time to do the same things they were doing before. So there has to be a process of educating ourselves, nurturing that part that we all have in us to reconnect with something deeper, both within ourselves and with each other.

Daniela Amodei  

This is so, so accurate. And, not to overly pick on the social media companies, but in addition to disintermediating us from one another, it has also in some ways disintermediated us from ourselves. That's also time that could be spent in nature, with animals, in self-reflection, taking on passion projects. Some of the use cases of Claude and artificial intelligence is the possibility for it to spark creativity, curiosity and joy in people. We were talking before about how we both love Greek mythology. Talking to Claude, it's a tool for me to also explore what it is that brings me value and meaning.

Arianna Huffington 

Yes.

Daniela Amodei

And so I ask Claude to help me pursue many of my passions either by giving me more information, so that could be recommending things, by actually helping me create projects that are valuable to me, even if they're not for productive work reasons. 

Arianna Huffington  

And you've said that in a world where AI is every day becoming more and more capable, the uniquely human qualities are going to become more and more important. So what do you think are some of these uniquely human qualities and how can we nurture them in each other and in ourselves?

Daniela Amodei 

My belief is humans are genuinely curious. We have a sort of instinctive desire to want to learn, to be creative, to be curious.

Arianna Huffington  

And to grow.

Daniela Amodei  

To grow, to develop, to be the best versions of ourselves and help other people be the best version of themselves in kind of the purest form. If we're able to get through the challenges, my sense is that on the kind of other side is this world in which human skills are the main thing that's left. In the future we might optimize for doctors who have a great bedside manner, who care about you personally, who show that they care.

And there's so much interesting research that shows that clinical outcomes are better when you have a good personal relationship with your doctor. That's just one example. If you imagine teachers who are not spending quite as much time developing curriculum and looking at all of the logistics and administrative duties that come with being in a school, maybe they're actually able to spend more time with kids. I met a woman recently who told me she runs a moms group for moms who use AI. The way she put it was, “We carry the majority of the mental load in a family.”

And just our ability to take some of that mental load and give it to Claude enables us to be able to spend more time with our families, to spend more time with ourselves, to spend more time with our friends, pick up passion projects, be curious about things again. And again, to me, this is a world that we all get to choose to build together. This is something that everyone has a right to participate in and say, “How do we want to not feel like this technology is happening to us, but that we're able to kind of take it by the reins and say, how can we use this to make it work better for ourselves, for other people, for our society?”

Arianna Huffington  

So I love how your whole life before Anthropic brought you to these realizations, because before Stripe, before OpenAI, before any of this, you were a classical flutist on a scholarship. I love that because the music demands something so different from us, just practicing for hours for a performance that's not going to be rushed and that's in the service of something beautiful rather than something useful. So what did you learn from playing the flute that has helped you in being the president of Anthropic?

Daniela Amodei 

A lot of the themes that we've been talking about are quite resonant with this. I personally loved the structure and discipline of practicing. I've always been someone who likes to work hard, but the ability to work hard at something and have it be a creative and meaningful and sort of cup-filling outcome — it's a very special privilege to be able to work hard at something and feel fulfilled from it. And I first got a sense of what that felt like from music. The second is that the part I enjoyed the most was playing with other people. In college and even before college, I did a lot of chamber music and I played in an orchestra. Part of what was so exciting about that, it sounds almost a little bit trite, but you're so much greater than the sum of your parts, right?

You have every different instrument that has its own special role. Everybody has the moment where they're in the spotlight and the moment when they're in the background, the moment when they're supporting another instrument and the moment when they're taking center stage. And I actually think about that a lot in how we build teams at Anthropic and how we work together, and get to sort of be the conductor. There's a particular experience, especially when you're on stage with many other people, where you can viscerally feel this emotion that you're part of something bigger than just you. I still love to go to the symphony. There's something about the experience of sitting in a theater and hearing people — this moment will never happen again. That touches something very deep and human in you.

Arianna Huffington 

I just love how extraordinary life is. Who could have predicted that somebody goes from being a flutist in an orchestra to having everybody report to her in the biggest AI company in the world? But you already mentioned what is actually my favorite Anthropic value, which is holding light and shade. This is so key because it's not just true about AI, it's true about all of us. We are all a mixture of better angels and lesser angels. So we are now at this historic moment when we talk about how AI can be constantly improving, but what can we do to also nurture our better angels? What can we do as a culture and what can AI do? 

Daniela Amodei 

This is actually advice that I give to the company a lot. And something I tell people is just my belief in the importance of balance in life. I love my job. I work really hard and I'm also a mom. I have a five-year-old and a one-year-old, and they are on their own schedule that is totally unrelated to my job. To me, the best version of life is one in which humans get to experience a lot of different facets of life that help them, like you've said, self-reflect on who they are, build community with other people, be curious and creative in ways that are meaningful and spark joy for them. Something I tell the organization is time off and rest is really important.

So many decades of psychology research and anthropological research seem to indicate that there's a few core things that help humans feel like the best versions of ourselves, right? One is adequate time to spend with the people you love — your family, your children, your friends, your partner, anybody that's meaningful to you. Like you've said, time with yourself, reflection time, whether that's for many people, religion, spirituality, time in nature, time feeling like you're connecting to something that's bigger than you. Work and meaning is another major area that often is self-reflective for people. And being embodied, the ability to be able to spend time in nature, walking, exercise. These are reasonably well documented as things that help people feel like the best versions of themselves in some form. And what's interesting, we were talking about this with social media — it really cuts against almost each one of those things. It sort of gives us the sort of cotton candy version of connection, right?

It tastes really sweet for a minute, but it's not actually filling. My hope again is that AI — there's a possibility that we could reverse some of that trend. Spend time with the people you love in person, spend time in nature, spend time connecting to something bigger than yourself. This is a decision. We all get to decide if this is the type of world that we want to build.

Arianna Huffington  

But also, as you have said, companies have to decide. I mean, you made some very key decisions, like you are not allowing ads, because ads require engagement, and the easiest way to engage people is by activating their rage and their anger — their lesser angels. So these are also very important company decisions. But you've also said, when asked about what's the good life, as Greek philosophers always asked each other, and you said it's really how do we become the best version of ourselves? But at the moment, we seem to be placing all our bets, Daniela, on the machines getting better and better and better. It's as though we are like — human beings are static and stagnant, and machines are these amazing creatures that have recursive self-improvement. But we all know from science and from spiritual traditions that human beings also have recursive self-improvement.

You've kind of alluded to it many times when you said we're curious, we want to learn, we want to grow. I really believe that this instinct to evolve is a real instinct. I actually wrote a book many years ago — don't worry, only three people have read it — called The Fourth Instinct, about our instinct beyond survival, sex and status, power — our instinct to evolve, to find meaning in life. And I just wonder, how can we open up the conversation to include recursive self-improvement for humans?

Daniela Amodei  

Yes. I absolutely love that question. To me there's almost three phases of it. The first phase is — it's almost like a base-of-the-pyramid principle, which is we can't be in a position where we're turning that impulse off — which again is sort of my worry about the current sort of mode of communication of technology through social media. You sort of alluded to this no-ads commitment from Anthropic, this idea that if you structure AI products the same way that you structured the last generation of products you will wind up with the same results. And I actually think it’s worse because AI is so personal. 

Arianna Huffington 

And so much more powerful.

Daniela Amodei 

So much more powerful, so much more personal, that ads targeted at sensitive health data or emotional conversations – people have emotional conversations sometimes with AI – it feels disrespectful to people to advertise to them based on the kind of content that they're putting into these tools. And maybe even more importantly, just to your point, the incentives that it sets up is to keep you on the platform, to keep you engaged, to keep you frustrated and to keep you on a screen, away from humans, away from connecting. And if we do things that way, everyone is really going to regret it. Does Claude end a conversation with you when you've gotten the information that you need? That base layer we absolutely have to do. 

The second is if the technology is doing its job the way it should be, how do we reclaim time and space to have the ability for people to recursively self-improve? This idea that humans will have more time for each other, for themselves — that to me is the second layer that sort of gives people agency and time to be curious, to self-reflect, to be better versions of themselves. 

The third, the very top of the pyramid in my mind, is how can we actually leverage these tools to drive people's curiosity? The idea of — oh, you're really interested in creating this art project, let me help work with you on how you and your friend are going to do that. How do you actually get the permitting to be able to do this in a public space? Let's do the application so that you can actually build this mosaic in your town square that you've been wanting to do for 20 years with your best friend.

The first two layers have to be there, but there's a role for AI at the top as well.

Arianna Huffington  

It's so incredible to have an AI leader like you talk about humans recursively self-improving. Can you please be talking about it every day? It's so important because it really validates what you said earlier — that bringing AI and humanity together is going to be what we need for a great future, that we are better together than growing separately. And it's a little bit like a dance, or a marriage — you're married, I'm divorced — but we all know that if one partner keeps growing and getting better and the other partner, in this case humans, stagnates, it's not going to be a successful partnership. So how can we, through expanding our conversation, through investing in different institutions, whether it's preschools, colleges, how can we keep helping humans become more and more capable so that this dance, in this revolutionary era, can be an amazing dance rather than a destructive dance?

Daniela Amodei  

It's so important to have this conversation. How do we help humans kind of come along in the era of artificial intelligence? The whole reason we're developing this technology is to help humans flourish and thrive and live better lives. And again, this sort of comes back to exactly this kind of symbiosis we've been talking about, right? I think the place that AI can be really helpful is in taking tasks and busy work off of our plates, so that we can do human interacting together more, spend more time together, but also so that we can expand the definition of what it means to do human work. 

Whether you live in a city or in a rural area or a suburb, maybe you know your neighbors, but people are much less inclined today to be part of something that they would identify as a community compared to 50 or 100 years ago. And something I'm really curious about is how can AI be part of the story for helping to rebuild some of the community spirit that is so important around the world. We have a program called Claude Corps, where we actually train people — especially young people who are coming out of graduate school, undergraduate school, trade schools, high school, really at every different level of education — to say, “How do you leverage AI to make your community better?” How can we teach you and sort of equip and empower you with the skills so that whether you want to be entrepreneurial and start a business that's great for your community, or support a soccer league, or become a teacher?

Arianna Huffington 

That's really important, because giving and service are not as central in most people's lives now, and yet they can add so much to becoming this best version of ourselves. And you came to your current job in a very untraditional way, and here we are at this health conference with Alice Walton, who also came to this in a very unexpected way, because this is a medical school here where humanities and the arts are at the heart of training doctors. So what does this background, in your case, help you see about AI and health that others might miss?

Daniela Amodei  

Outside of the humanities connection, I also spent the first years of my career working in global health. Something that has been really powerful and inspiring to me, having done this work, is seeing the ways that AI is transforming healthcare access, opportunity tracking, data infrastructure, information — everything, everywhere around the globe.

Arianna Huffington  

What about an everyday case? Millions of people talk to Claude, and talk to AI generally, about symptoms, medications, emotional struggles. At what point do you think a responsible AI would say, “I don't know," or send the person to a human? How do you keep it from telling someone things they just want to hear — this flattery problem?

Daniela Amodei 

Yes. This question about sycophancy is extremely important. We have done a lot of work to reduce sycophancy in our models, because of many of the reasons that you suggest, and also because it just feels disingenuous, right? If a model just says, “Oh, you're right, Daniela, you're right. You're so smart, you're right about everything, you're right in that conflict” — is that promoting the level of self-reflection, curiosity, learning, growth, humanism that we actually want to see in the world? And my answer is no. Sometimes you need someone to say, “Actually, you might be wrong about this,” or, “Here's a person you should go talk to.” Claude is actually quite sensitive to pushing the person interacting with them toward other people. So Claude tends to say, “Hey, email your doctor with this question,” or, “let me help you figure out the right questions to ask your doctor.” Claude is not a replacement for medical care.

I will share an individual story for me, and how Claude helped me in a medical situation. When I was seven months pregnant with my daughter, who's now one, I got a really bad bacterial infection, but I was misdiagnosed by three sets of doctors — by my OB, by my GP, and in the emergency room. And this is not because any of those are bad doctors, right? They're really busy, they're looking at a roster of symptoms, and Claude was actually able to properly diagnose me and say, actually, treating a bacterial infection isn't that hard, you just take antibiotics. But because I hadn't gotten the proper diagnosis, I was in a pretty bad spot. And so the ability for me to say, “Hey, is it possible — could we test for a bacterial infection?” ultimately resulted in an outcome that was much more favorable for me and baby.

I think about if I hadn't had that intervention, what might have happened?

Arianna Huffington  

I love this story as another example of symbiosis. And it's really also part of Alice's vision, which is that health is complicated. It's physical, it's mental, it's social, it's spiritual — it's everything together. And the other thing that I'm very passionate about is that we now have so much science that makes it clear that health is also what happens between doctor visits — like how we sleep, what we eat, how we move and exercise, how we manage stress, how we connect with ourselves and others. These five daily habits are instrumental in our health. And I'm really excited about how AI, again through its power of hyper-personalization, can come up with the right nudge, the right recommendation, to help us every day improve these daily habits. Is that something you think should be given more attention? 

Daniela Amodei  

I have certainly personally experienced this, where sometimes even if I'm talking to Claude, I’m asking a question, its ability to pull information from prior conversations to say, “Oh, this reminds me of when you had this other symptom a year ago.” There's something very special and unique — again, in concert with a human doctor — about just the ability to have this tool that is keeping track. And there's something potentially really powerful and self-empowering about humans to be able to say, “Wow, this is this tool that can help me understand my own health, wellness, and happiness better. And how can I then take that information and use it to partner with my doctor, or with myself, or with whoever, to really live a healthier, happier life?”

Arianna Huffington 

We're at this incredible moment when AI is — or if not right now, is soon going to be — more intelligent than we are. How can we use this moment for humanity? Can we just say, “Okay, AI, you own intelligence, can humans own wisdom?” Because Homo sapiens means wise man and wise woman. It doesn't mean intelligent man. So if you think of it, since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we started defining ourselves by our intelligence — I think, therefore I am. But our wisdom, our soul, our spirit, our consciousness, whatever name you want to give it, is so infinitely more important, more powerful. So can we actually see this moment of AI dethroning intelligence as our primary identification as an incredible moment, where we can say, great, let's go beyond intelligence. And I feel women here have an incredible role to play, because traditionally women have had this connection with the deepest parts of our humanity, partly by giving birth, partly by being so rooted in their community.

So what do you think about if we let Claude have intelligence and humans have wisdom?

Daniela Amodei  

So much of the interesting core of what I hear from you is this concept that intelligence is just one facet of what it means to be human. And so really what we're talking about is this sort of one branch of it that AI is very powerful at, which is the ability to compute things, to do mathematics, to synthesize data at a superhuman level. But there are so many other things that I find are deeply human and that I don't think AI can replace. Claude can never be your manager, or your therapist, or your partner, or your kids, right? Those are fundamental human relationships that I actually think will become more important, we will spend more time on, and we will value more, in a future of artificial intelligence than we value it today.

Arianna Huffington  

This is a great moment to end, and just go through a very quick lightning round.

Daniela Amodei  

Great.

Arianna Huffington  

So what keeps you up at night, besides your children?

Daniela Amodei  

Other than my kids, worrying that artificial intelligence will become such a politicized topic that it will be hard for us as a broader society to have the type of important conversation that you and I are having right now. This is going to go better if we all feel like this is something we're doing together versus it happening to us.

Arianna Huffington  

So what does your five-year-old think that you do all day at work?

Daniela Amodei  

There was a wonderful alligator, white albino alligator, named Claude at the California Academy of Sciences. And one day, for his birthday, I actually took my son to the Academy of Sciences, and he said when we were looking around, he said, “Mama, Claude!” He hears me say Claude at home a lot. So I'm pretty sure he still thinks that I am a zookeeper, or an animal keeper, at the Academy of Sciences. I have not done that much to dispel him of that image.

Arianna Huffington  

So I know you like physical books. What books do you have on your nightstand?

Daniela Amodei  

I actually have four right now. I'll go from the most literary to the least literary. The first is a collection of short stories by E.M. Forster. Have you read The Machine Stops? 

Arianna Huffington

Yes!

Daniela Amodei

 An excellent, excellent short story. I think some of the themes we've talked about — about human relations, and people being together, and love of nature, and the human spirit — feels very powerful in that short story in particular. The second is I have Leaves of Grass; I love Walt Whitman. The third — I'm getting now into the less literary — there’s a book I'm reading now called The House in the Cerulean Sea and then the least literary, I am reading Yesteryear. So I have to disclose that.

Arianna Huffington  

If you are the world's AI czar — and I'm very happy to nominate you — what would be the first thing you would do?

Daniela Amodei  

I think it's too significant of a technology for it to be governed by one person, or for one person to be responsible for it. So as czar, I'd probably abolish the concept of me being an AI czar, and can we find a way for more people to be included and empowered in the conversation of what should happen with artificial intelligence?

Arianna Huffington  

Thank you so much for this incredibly inspiring conversation.

Daniela Amodei 

Thank you. It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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