Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei told JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin in a Squawk Box interview that incumbent software-as-a-service vendors who refuse to pivot around large language models will lose market value, with some likely to disappear entirely, even as Dimon defended the industry's roughly $1 trillion of planned AI infrastructure spend as money the technology will earn back over time.
Amodei was unusually blunt for an AI chief executive who counts the SaaS industry as both a customer and a competitor. "It's very possible for individual SaaS companies to lose market value, go bankrupt completely, go bust," he said. "But it depends on the response. There are incumbents today that are going to see very clearly we have a lot of moat here. The moats here are going away. We're really going to pivot and we'll do better than we did before. And there are others who are not going to pay attention, who are going to be blindsided. And they're going to have a really bad time."
The Anthropic chief also issued a sharp warning on the geopolitics of model development, telling Sorkin that the window for the United States to lead is narrow. "Chinese AI models will catch up in just six to 12 months," he said.
Dimon, asked whether the roughly $1 trillion of planned AI capex over the next year is rational, defended the spending while conceding it will not produce winners evenly. "The way I look at it is that in total, it will make sense," Dimon said. "If you want to try to pick the winners and losers, you will have a hard time. So there will be losers in that. There'll be winners or people said, 'I told you so' and stuff like that. But the technology itself is so powerful. It's worth $1 trillion of investment and the investment is way beyond that, by the way. It's in chips, it's in wires and it's in hardware and all these other various things. But technology tends to pay for itself, just not in a straight line."
The pair also clashed gently over the right regulatory model. Sorkin pressed both on whether the White House should set up an FDA-style approval body for frontier models. Amodei said some guardrails are inevitable. "We don't want a Wild West where you can just do anything," he said. "There was literally no law, no requirement preventing us from just offering this thing in the wild with no safeguards. So should there be? Yes." But he added a caveat about regulators slowing innovation: "The example you gave of the FDA, I think the FDA slows down medical progress a lot. So that's a cautionary tale in the other direction."
Dimon, told earlier in the segment about Verizon chief executive Dan Schulman's recent forecast that AI could push US unemployment to 20–30% within two to five years, pushed back without dismissing the underlying concern. "Technologies have made mankind's lives better forever, starting with agriculture and electricity and internet," he said. "All these things were used by bad guys too, by the way, all of them have got some kind of regulation, proper or over-regulated sometimes. So I think it's a legitimate concern when you look at this technology, it is exponential. And if you look at agriculture and steam engine, electricity, internet, it took years to roll those in. And the capitalist society is very good at recreating jobs and creating new things."
Dimon stopped well short of endorsing the Schulman number. "I don't think it's going to be quite like that," he said, while adding the caveat that "we should worry about the people who get hurt by something."
The interview, which Sorkin moderated yesterday with both men on stage, also touched on Anthropic's conversations with the Pentagon, conversations between industry chief executives and the White House over a possible executive order to set up an AI 'working group', and a longer thread on retraining displaced workers that Sorkin said CNBC will publish in a separate clip.