Yann LeCun calls Anthropic’s Dario Amodei ‘deluded’, Fortune reports

Yann LeCun does not worry “at all” about AI wiping out humanity, and he has “zero concerns” about the recent run of rogue AI incidents. The Turing Award winner said so in an interview with Emily Forlini for Fortune . He also called Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei “deluded” and, later in the interview, “crazy”.

LeCun blamed the incidents on poor human oversight and system design, including the Hugging Face hack by OpenAI’s agents in July. They were “totally preventable”, he said, and many AI labs lack a basic grasp of cybersecurity.

“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do. They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed,” LeCun told Fortune.

Many people in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push”, LeCun said. He made clear he meant effective altruism (EA), the movement focused on the risks AI poses to humanity. He called it “super toxic” and “a complete disaster”, and said its followers inside AI labs suffer from a “paranoia” that leads to poor decisions.

EA drew wide attention last month after a viral post by Jacob Coxon , a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher. He wrote that staff at the labs believe AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade.

Amodei and several of Anthropic’s founders have sympathised with EA ideas and attended EA events in the past, Fortune noted. Amodei has denied being an EA adherent, and Anthropic says its staff hold a range of views. LeCun pointed out that Holden Karnofsky’s wife is Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president and co-founder. Karnofsky co-founded Open Philanthropy, now called Coefficient Giving. LeCun said Amodei tries to keep his distance from it but is “totally into it”.

When Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman say AI could kill everyone, it hurts the public and the industry alike, LeCun said. He called it the “worst marketing campaign” imaginable.

He worries more about regulatory capture than about extinction. In regulatory capture, dominant companies shape the rules to lock out smaller rivals. LeCun called Amodei “honest” and said he is doing what is best for Anthropic as it nears its IPO. Calling AI too dangerous for the public, pushing for regulation and calling open-source models dangerous add up to regulatory capture, he said. That would be damaging if Congress acted on it. LeCun does not think AI needs new rules.

LeCun mostly uses social media to criticise the Trump administration’s cuts to research budgets, Fortune noted. On AI fears, though, the two are close. Trump signed an executive order this week that renames AI “super intelligence”.

LeCun left Meta after 12 years, seven of them as chief AI scientist, to found AMI Labs . AMI has its headquarters in Paris, staff in New York, Montreal and Singapore, and more than 60 employees. It builds world models on JEPA, an architecture LeCun pioneered. JEPA predicts data inside a model’s internal representations, instead of generating pixels or words.

For now, AMI focuses on industry. Its systems aim to understand places like a manufacturing plant or a jet engine, for example to spot a machine that starts to fail. LeCun is still on good terms with Meta and uses its Muse AI agents. He named his Hal, after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. AMI’s first product is coming “soon” and may involve open models, he said.