Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei outlines state of AI and impact of pace of models at Dreamforce 2026

Here we have the CEO of Anthropic right here, Dario. Hello, Dario. How are you? Hey. Great to have you. Fantastic. Great job, Dario. You're doing an amazing job leading the AI industry, guiding it all right from our Slack headquarters building. We watch you every day. We're watching it from you. Thank you. It's all good karma, isn't it? And we're watching you doing an incredible job. You've become the number one AI in the world, three times larger than the nearest provider. It's been amazing to be partnered with you. It's all been very karmic and kismet and good. And one of the things I have to ask you before we get into the interview, I want to talk to you about AI force. I want to talk to you about cloud force. I want to talk to you about how you're running your own business. But wow, you, you know, you, I mean, everything from your first essay that you wrote, you know, about loving grace to, to the essay this weekend on pacing has been incredible, but give us your state of the AI industry and pacing and where your mind is right now. Yeah, I think it's maybe easiest to explain it by an analogy. So let's say you're running a car company and another car company, not yours, they have some kind of safety incident, right? Something goes wrong with the brakes, you know, something with the manufacturing. Now, you believe you have the best safety record in the industry. What do you do? How do you approach it? Obviously, it's very tempting to attack your competitor and say, these guys are unsafe or safe. But I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, hey, first of all, let's look at our own record, right? We may not have had this big high profile incident, but I'm sure we're not perfect. Let's look at everything and we can always be better. Let's make our practices better. Let's recommit to transparency. Let's invest more in safety. Then let's organize the rest of the industry and say, what can we do to set standards for everyone? What can we do to make everyone's standards better? And then finally, there should be an international component to it. And that's essentially the three-step plan that I laid out in the essay, the first of which we committed to and the others of which we're going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry about. And I think that's the way to lead the industry forward. To set an example, to say that everyone can always be better. Let me ask you a question, Dario. You know, it's been amazing what you have been able to accomplish, like I said, but there are a lot of surprises also that you have gone through. So, you know, just tell us what has been your biggest surprise over the last decade? And, you know, you've obviously been heads down in AI now for 10 years, really in earnest. What's your biggest shock about where we are right now? You know, it's been the pace of the progress. Not just of the technology, but of the economic side of it. So we, you know, I formulated the scaling laws along with some of my co-founders, which tell you that AI models get smarter and smarter the more compute you throw into them. And so we had a prediction of just how capable these models would be. But I think what we didn't appreciate. Is that it would lead to these companies growing so fast to all these incredible products that we're working together on and you've been talking about today and how quickly they would become central to everything that's going on in the world, right? I just watched the talks before that where you guys talked about MCP and cowork and Claude skills and these are all new things that people are just beginning to use, but they're being adopted so quickly because the economic value is so great. Great, so I've just been surprised. That such a pace is possible in the business world. Well, I'll tell you at Salesforce, we are huge co-work fans. And also when I was in Europe, I met with so many customers who are co-work fans. It's incredible what you've done with the product. I'm noticing over your shoulder here. You've got a few Salesforce alumni behind you who are helping you to run your company. You train them well, Mark. You train them well. Trying to do my best to help the whole industry. You know. You know? I measure myself by how many CEOs, COOs, and CROs are in other companies that all came from Salesforce. You do a fantastic job of that. No, truly, truly you do. Thank you. But what I want to say is this. I want to say, you know, yes, we have to keep our eye on the pace of AI. You know, it's been amazing what's happened over 10 years. No one could have written the story. Now these interfaces are truly amazing. The demo we just saw is remarkable. I think every customer here wants to have that same interface on all of their systems. Everybody wants to unlock the trap value. You know, what is your... For a kind of recommendation for everyone in this room and the virtual room, obviously you can see we have 10,000 people all over this room, but 10 million joining us online. You know, what actions do you want us to take? Yeah. So, you know, I would I would just say when I look at the technology versus how much it has diffused, even if we freeze the technology in place, which we're not doing, facing the frontier is not not doing that at all. The technology will keep getting better. But just suppose we freezed it in place. Even if that were the case, we're making use of maybe only five or 10% of what the possible value of the technology is. So I'll give you just an example that relates to what we're doing together and to the CCO you just pointed at, which is that Paul, you know, every day now he wakes up and if he wants to look at our head go-to-market prospects, he still uses Salesforce, but he uses Salesforce with Claude. He talks to Claude using Salesforce's data about, you know, what are the 10 biggest deals we're doing this week? What are the 10 deals we're most likely to lose? What are the themes in those deals? How do we win those deals? You know, just making use of all the information fluently with Claude. And it's really incredible. And the fraction of people who have... Seeing this and seeing that this is possible is still small compared to those who could gain utility from it. And so there is still so much diffusion left to do. Well, we are really excited to wake everybody up at the show to show people what the possibilities are for the future, how we're going to show them that data layer, which, as you know, I think is really critical that having that grounding of the data. We've talked about that so many times, the application and semantic layer, giving it The AI, even more intelligence capability, the agentic layer that... You've really helped pioneer and now this incredible interface layer. And we're so excited that the first one is on co-work. Congratulations. Well done. We're going to do incredible things together. Mario, you're doing a great job. Thanks for everything you're doing for the whole industry. We're so grateful to you. Thank you for having me. Really thrilled. Thank you so much. All right. And thank you for coming to Dreamforce. Please thank the Anthropic team.