Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a friend in 2007 that the Singularity — the moment when artificial intelligence achieves super intelligence and exceeds the ability of the human brain — would arrive by 2040, the New York Times reported Thursday. A high school classmate claimed he was “obsessed” with building AI correctly to prevent the end of the world. As Anthropic approaches a public offering currently valued at $1.45 trillion, Amodei’s worldview shapes the company’s desire for AI regulation. “We would over time become the new superintelligent A.I. or A.I.-human hybrid,” Amodei told his friend Colin Heckman, according to the NYT. Amodei pushed his sister and friends to attend conferences on the Singularity with him, consumed niche media as a Princeton Doctoral student such as the blogs “Accelerating Future” and “Overcoming Bias,” and was interested in Ray Kurzweil’s concept of transhumanism. Amodei was a research scientist at Chinese tech firm Baidu’s AI lab between Nov. 2014 and Oct. 2015, and he has since become a vocal critic of restricting advanced AI chip sales to China. “It is mortgaging our future as a country to sell these chips to China,” Amodei suggested at Axios AI + DC Summit in Sept. 2025, Axios reported. Amodei’s perspective is largely influenced by rational