A cure for cancer is less than a decade away, if you ask Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
If you ask some in the medical community, though, that timeline is a bit ambitious, if not altogether unrealistic.
In a 42-minute IPO roadshow video the company released on Tuesday, Amodei made the audacious prediction that "cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness — these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade."
The claim that all those diseases, which have bedeviled medicine's best minds for centuries, will be suddenly cured by AI riled some AI naysayers and physicians, who took to X to voice their disbelief.
"Curing cancer, Alzheimer's and mental illnesses can definitely benefit from AI. But that is impossible in just 10 years," Karl Lauterbach, Germany's former health minister, said on X.
"Unclear whether people like @DarioAmodei know so little about medicine or are deliberately misleading the public," he added.
Melinda B. Chu, an AI medical researcher with an MD from Saint Louis University, said Amodei made those predictions just to stoke hype for the company's IPO.
"Anthropic has done nothing to suggest they themselves will contribute meaningfully to these goals," Chu said.
Rami Elghandour, a biotech executive, said Amodei's prediction reeks of desperation. "I've taken two companies public. These are insane things to say in an IPO pitch," he said.
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Amodei, long prone to waxing poetic about how AI could be misused by bad actors, has sought to soften his doomer reputation by, in part, highlighting AI's potential benefit to medicine.
Anthropic has moved to expand its reach into drug development by buying several biotech startups, including a one-person company focused on developing treatments for muscular dystrophy.
In an October blog post, the company said it had "begun drug discovery efforts of our own."
The company also opened a "wet lab" in the Bay Area to explore how AI technology can support research in fundamental biology, a person familiar with the matter said.
In an August X post, Amodei said that the best way to win over AI skeptics is for AI companies to "actually cure cancer." In that post, however, he also noted that "saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive."
With the company's looming IPO, as it seeks to convince investors to buy stock at a trillion-dollar valuation, Amodei's calculus has apparently shifted.
"I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles," Amodei said in the video.