In a candid conversation on episode 1905 of the No Agenda Show, venture capitalist and All In Podcast co-host Jason Calacanis offered a blunt assessment of the artificial intelligence industry, arguing that leading safety-focused lab Anthropic has succumbed to a quasi-religious belief in its own mission. “They actually think that they are creating a god. They're not. They're creating software,” Calacanis told host Adam Curry, comparing the company’s effective-altruism roots to the overreaching engineers in the film Prometheus. The remarks underscore a growing schism in Silicon Valley between those who view AI as an existential risk and those who see such rhetoric as a smokescreen for regulatory capture.
Calacanis’s critique came amid a broader deconstruction of the week’s tech and political news. He seized on Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s new code of conduct and Suleyman’s public criticism of Anthropic’s “model welfare” doctrine, which treats AI models as entities deserving of ethical consideration. Curry played clips of University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos describing a reported Anthropic “funeral” for a retired Claude model, a ritual that Calacanis suggested reveals a cult-like mentality. For Calacanis, the real danger is not runaway AI but frontier labs lobbying Washington to erect barriers against open-source competitors like DeepSeek, GLM, and NeMoTron. “The real story is regulatory capture,” he said, warning that established players are using safety fears to stifle innovation.
The episode also tackled the reported Hugging Face security incident and ensuing calls for an AI “kill switch,” which Calacanis dismissed as impractical and alarmist. He and Curry then turned to the political weaponization of data centers, highlighting candidates like Texas Democrat James Talarico who have made local opposition to data center expansion a central campaign issue. The backlash, Calacanis argued, reflects a deeper unease with Big Tech’s unchecked growth and its strain on energy grids and communities. Those tensions are likely to intensify as AI demand for compute continues to soar.
Calacanis also shared behind-the-scenes details from the recent All In Summit at the Shrine Auditorium, which drew 3,000 attendees and surprise call-ins from President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. He recounted Huang fumbling the speakerphone button when Trump called mid-panel and described pressing Meta’s Dina about the company’s record $17 billion settlement during a data-center segment. The summit’s star power, he suggested, illustrates how AI and tech policy have become inseparable from mainstream politics.
Curry pivoted to Bitcoin, predicting a $430,000 peak, while Calacanis discussed parenting in the smartphone era. The pair also reflected on the late John C. Dvorak, whose memory drives the show’s ongoing Order of the Ant tribute campaign. For listeners seeking an irreverent alternative to conventional news analysis, the full episode is available on the No Agenda Show website. The conversation highlights a pivotal moment: as AI capabilities advance, the battle over its narrative—between god-like ambition and pragmatic software development—will shape regulation, investment, and public trust for years to come.
