Anthropic CEO says AI growth is exponential. Anthropic re…

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, likens the development of AI to the Hobbits from 'The Lord of the Rings,' arguing that AI capabilities can exponentially increase with more computing power. He asserts that existing empirical evidence supports this hypothesis, claiming we may soon see 'Powerful AI.' However, critics argue that this exponential growth is overstated, citing Anthropic's own documentation that indicates cognitive improvements stem primarily from human research, not rapid advances in AI. Further scrutiny reveals that evidence for sustained exponential growth is lacking, with some researchers proposing we may have reached limits in AI scaling. The debate continues as Amodei's claims face significant skepticism from leading experts in the field.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, looking perplexed in an interview

Credit: Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Dario Amodei, CEO and founder of Anthropic, just published an online essay that starts out by comparing AI to the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. And that may not be the only piece of fiction in it, if the system card from Anthropic's own Claude Mythos model is to be believed.

"The intersection of AI and our political institutions feels a bit like the Hobbits and Treebeard," Amodei writes — that is, Treebeard the Ent moves so slow that he can't even understand the speedy Hobbits. But then Amodei pivots to a controversial assertion — one that, to continue the Lord of the Rings analogy, would mean that Hobbits are moving exponentially faster all the time.

"AI's scaling laws, which predict an exponential increase in general cognitive capabilities with increasing computing power, now have over a decade of empirical evidence behind them," Amodei claims. "If these scaling laws continue for only a year or two longer, we are likely to get what I've called Powerful AI."

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It's hardly a one-off reference; Amodei, who is about to cash in on a bonanza Anthropic IPO, uses the word "exponential" six times in the essay. That includes the title, "Policy on the AI exponential." But is it true?

Let's leave for one moment the dubious 2020 OpenAI paper Amodei links to prove his assertion, or the abundant evidence from other AI experts that the "cognitive capabilities" of most Large Language Models are not growing that fast, if at all. Amodei's essay appears to contradict the word of ... well, Anthropic itself.

On the system card for the preview of Claude Mythos [PDF], the model that Amodei hypes up in the essay for the cybersecurity concerns it has caused, you'll find the following statement: "The [intelligence] gains we can identify are confidently attributable to human research, not AI assistance ... early claims of large AI-attributable wins have not held up." [Emphasis ours.]

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You might think it can't get more definitive than that — unless you read the system card for Anthropic's other new frontier model, Fable 5. Using a test called the Epoch Capabilities Index, Anthropic researchers specifically set out to see if there was evidence of a feedback loop that would lead to what AI experts have variously called AGI or Digital Superintelligence. And the result couldn't be clearer.

"We do not observe a sustained, AI-attributable 2× acceleration in the pace of our AI progress," the Fable system card [PDF] says.

So, where is Amodei getting his exponential information from? We've reached out to Anthropic for clarification, but the citation the CEO uses is for a 2020 paper called Scaling Laws for Neural Language models, co-authored by Jared Kaplan (then with OpenAI, now a co-founder of Anthropic). The conclusion of that paper has been called into question by another leading AI researcher, Gary Marcus, for the past four years.

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"There are serious holes in the scaling argument," Marcus wrote in 2022. "Indeed, we may already be running into scaling limits in deep learning, perhaps already approaching a point of diminishing returns." He cited research on OpenAI's GPT-3 model, which has "shown that scaling starts to falter on some measures, such as toxicity, truthfulness, reasoning, and common sense."

Marcus was pilloried by AI true believers at the time, but has since been vindicated — especially since the release of GPT-5, which was not the Superintelligence some of its users hoped for.

Finding evidence for AI exponential growth since then may be harder than simply walking into Mordor.

Additional reporting provided by Timothy Werth

Topics Artificial Intelligence Anthropic

Chris Taylor

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Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.

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Trump Mobile T1

We knew it looked familiar. Credit: Trump Mobile

Now that the Trump Mobile T1 phone is available for purchase, we finally have a chance to see what's it really made of. And, as suspected, it's not a very original device.

The folks at iFixit have torn down the Trump Phone (as it's colloquially known), and found that it's very similar to HTC's U24 Pro phone. Very, very similar. OK, they're the same phone, with some very minor differences.

If you're unfamiliar with HTC, it's a Taiwanese consumer electronics company that used to be a big smartphone player, but these days it's a company with shrinking revenues that focuses on VR and niche Android phones. The HTC U24 Pro came out in 2024; it's a 6.8-inch smartphone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip, 12GB of RAM, 256/512GB of storage, a triple, 50/50/8-megapixel camera, and a 4,600mAh battery.

The similarities between HTC's phone from 2024 and the Trump Phone were apparent after the two devices were scanned with an industrial x-ray CT scanner (see image below).

Trump Phone vs HTC U24 Pro

They're the same picture.Credit: iFixit/Lumafield

Of course, the proper teardown, as well as the similarities between the two devices' specs confirmed the suspicions (the Trump Mobile T1's official specs are here). The visual changes between the two devices boil down to a slightly different chassis, the gold paint on the Trump Phone and the shape of the holes in the speaker grille.

Inside, the components are either the same or very similar, but there are certain differences, including a slightly larger battery on the Trump Phone. It also appears that several components of the Trump Phone were made in the Phillipines, in an apparent move to avoid components made in China (where phone batteries are typically made).