Anthropic CEO says we’re gonna need more than UBI to solve inequality

• Rapid advances in AI may concentrate power and wealth among a small elite.
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says a universal basic income may not sufficiently address the shift.
• He says there needs to be a broader economic reorganization.

The rapid advances in AI could consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a small few, which is why many in the tech industry have called for a universal basic income.

But some AI leaders worry even a UBI wouldn’t be enough.

“I certainly think that’s better than nothing,” Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told Time. “But I would much prefer a world in which everyone can contribute. It would be kind of dystopian if there are these few people that can make trillions of dollars, and then the government hands it all out to the unwashed masses.”

Amodei, a former OpenAI employee, launched Anthropic in 2021 with his sister, Daniela, and five other OpenAI colleagues. They believed AI would have a dramatic impact on the world and wanted to build a company that would ensure it was aligned with human values. Amodei described it to Time as a company focused on “public benefit.”

Many in the tech industry have expressed support for universal basic income, a recurring cash payment to all adults in a given population regardless of their wealth or employment status, to mitigate the economic impact of AI. The idea is that it will act as a safety net for individuals whose jobs have been threatened by the technology.

But Amodei thinks that AI will alter society in such a fundamental way that we need to design a more comprehensive solution. “I think in the long run, we’re really going to need to think about how do we organize the economy, and how humans think about their lives?” He doesn’t have the answer, in part, because he believes it needs to be a “conversation among humanity.”

Amodei isn’t the only one thinking beyond universal basic income. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while a vocal proponent of it, has also proposed the idea of a “universal basic compute.” The idea is that as large language models advance, owning a slice of one will be more valuable than money.