Anthropic's Dario Amodei gets the SNL treatment

Saturday Night Live took on the AI industry's warnings of doom in the latest Weekend Update, as cast member Jane Wickline performed an impression of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The sketch, reported by TechCrunch, put the industry's recent alarms on late-night television.

The sketch

Weekend Update host Michael Che, who sounded a little uncertain about how to pronounce Amodei's last name, kicked off the segment by describing the CEO as having “stumbled through a press tour.” In that tour, the sketch suggested, Amodei agreed with a former employee's claim that artificial intelligence might destroy humanity.

Wickline's version of Amodei wore an impressive wig and delivered halting answers that occasionally devolved into Gollum-style exchanges with their own dark side. At one point the character confessed: “AI is the devil and I its maker.”

The fictional executive also assured the audience that AI leaders “are all on the same page here: We do not condone what we are doing.”

The best lines

Other jokes targeted the awkward position of executives who sell the technology while warning about it. “AI is not a weapon, it's a tool: A tool for building weapons,” Wickline's Amodei declared. “And I urge you to urge me to stop.”

On the technology's supposed benefits, including the hope that it could one day cure cancer, the fictional CEO had a pitch of his own: “Put it this way: In 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.”

Why it matters

The sketch arrives as warnings about advanced AI move from research papers and conference stages into mainstream entertainment. Amodei and other lab leaders have spent months publicly discussing the risks of the systems they are building; SNL's answer was to make the contradiction itself the punchline.