Artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. At least, Dario Amodei thinks it might. Amodei is the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 and launched Claude, an closed-source A.I. agent, in 2023. The company is currently preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO), meaning that they are going to sell shares of their stock to the general public. While the date for the IPO has not yet been announced, the IPO prospectus, a formal legal document companies are required to file before going public, was leaked to Reuters. In the document, Dario Amodei states that A.I. models may present an “existential risk to humanity.”

Since its origination, Amodei and Anthropic have been advocates for greater regulation and caution in regards to developing A.I. In 2025, Amodei sat for an interview with John Collison where he said, 

“I started a company not because I was initially excited about selling things or business or any of that; I’d seen the way that some of the other companies had run and the magnitude and gravity of what they were trying to build, and I was just a bit concerned that the people and the motivations were maybe not the best ones, and you know, I knew that there would be a number of players in this space, but it felt like having at least one player that kind of had a strong compass in how we do things could have positive effects on the ecosystem. We would build things in a different way, we would deploy them in a different way, and above all, we would have a, again sometimes short, list of principles, but we would stick to them as well as we could.” 

When Collison asked Amodei about the potential risks of A.I., Amodei stated, “Some of the dangers of A.I. have the potential to significantly destabilize society or threaten humanity or civilization, and so, I think we don’t want to take idle chances with that level of risk.” Despite this, Amodei expressed that he doesn’t believe that A.I. development should be stopped or slowed, saying “It’s just not possible; we have geopolitical adversaries. They’re not going to not make the technology… I mean, if you even propose even the slightest amount of regulation– I have [proposed regulation], and… I have many trillions of dollars of capital lined up against me [from people] for whom that’s not in their interest.” 

Anthropic has also been transparent in the past about undesirable behavior from their A.I. models. In 2025, they admitted that a model they were testing exhibited behavior akin to blackmail. In an essay penned for the New York Times, Dario Aomdei wrote, 

“Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife.  This scenario isn’t fiction. Anthropic’s latest A.I. model demonstrated just a few weeks ago that it was capable of this kind of behavior.  Despite some misleading headlines, the model didn’t do this in the real world. Its behavior was part of an evaluation where we deliberately put it in an extreme experimental situation to observe its responses and get early warnings about the risks, much like an airplane manufacturer might test a plane’s performance in a wind tunnel.” 

In the same essay, Amodei also claimed that Anthropic was not the only A.I. developer experiencing these kinds of risks, and he noted that OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, tested a model that “at times wrote special code to stop itself from being shut down.” 

Despite the mounting concerns over the safety of the artificial intelligence models currently in development, United States President Donald Trump recently opted not to construct any federal regulations on A.I. expansion after a meeting with leading developers of A.I. on Sept. 29. President Trump previously posted about A.I. regulation on Truth Social, writing, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” When a reporter asked him if anything from the Sept. 29 meeting had changed his opinion on the necessity of guardrails for A.I., President Trump claimed that he is “seeing tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self-police.” Consequently, the CEOs signed an accord wherein they agreed to perform internal and external reviews of their technology. When asked if the accord was binding in any way, President Trump responded, “I think it’s morally binding, yeah.” Moving forward, artificial intelligence will remain unregulated on a national level, and any external regulation will now have to come at a state level.

College is often described as an investment in our future. We spend four years and, for many students, tens of thousands of dollars (in fact, the average cost of college in the United States is 39,406 dollars) in exchange for a degree that is supposed to lead to a better job and a higher salary. Because of this, it makes sense to think about college as a financial investment. Higher education is expensive, and students deserve to know whether taking on that cost is likely to improve their lives. The financial calculation has become especially difficult as tuition has risen and student debt has become a defining feature of American college life. So when young people ask whether college is worth it, I understand the question, but I think it is important we examine the assumption that the value of an education can be determined by what it gives us in return.

There are plenty of practical reasons to go to college. It can provide professional training, develop writing and communication skills and introduce students to people and ideas they would not otherwise encounter. For many of us, it also marks the first time we have to navigate adulthood largely on our own. But this mindset still treats education as a means to something else. While it is true that college is worthwhile because it makes us better employees, better citizens or better prepared adults there is also a more fundamental reason to value it.

Learning does not always need to be useful, but this idea has become surprisingly difficult to defend. We have become accustomed to asking what something is for. A degree should lead to a career. A class should teach a marketable skill. A major should lead to a job. Even when we defend the humanities, we often do so by pointing out that studying history or philosophy develops “critical thinking,” as though the subject itself needs to be defended in court before we are allowed to pursue it. There is nothing wrong with those skills. They are valuable. But they are not the only reason to learn.

Consider philosophy. A philosophy class might ask whether human beings have free will, whether morality exists independently of human opinion or what makes a government legitimate. None of these questions comes with a clear career path attached to it. That does not make them frivolous. Knowing how other people have answered these questions changes the way we understand the world. It gives us concepts for thinking about problems we might otherwise struggle to articulate. It exposes us to arguments we may ultimately reject, but that we would not have been capable of considering before. The same is true across the humanities. Studying history can change how you understand the present. Literature can introduce you to experiences far removed from your own. Political theory can make familiar institutions look strange enough to question. Art can teach you to pay attention to things you might otherwise overlook. None of these experiences need to increase your salary to have value.

This is not an argument for ignoring the financial reality of college. Students should not be encouraged to take on life-changing amounts of debt for an education they cannot afford. Colleges should be held accountable for rising costs, and students should have access to honest information about employment and earnings. But there is a difference between recognizing that education has a cost and deciding that its only legitimate return is financial.

In fact, that distinction matters because treating students entirely as economic actors changes what we expect from college. If the purpose of higher education is simply to produce workers, then the obvious solution is to eliminate anything that does not directly contribute to employment. But that would leave out a large part of what education has historically been for.

Universities have always been places where people pursue questions because they are worth asking. The idea that knowledge can be valuable without an immediate practical application is hardly new. What is relatively new is how strongly we have come to expect every part of our education to justify itself economically. College should certainly prepare students for the working world. But it should also give them the opportunity to encounter ideas that have no obvious use, ask questions with no obvious answer and become interested in things simply because they are interesting.