The Untold Story of Dario Amodei’s Antiwar Past, as His AI Tech is Used for a New Middle East War

I’m a bit older than Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, but not enough for it to matter, and I learned recently we have something significant in common. When he was in college at Caltech, and I was a student at the University of Maryland, we both threw ourselves into organizing protests against the looming invasion of Iraq. It was, for me, a formative experience. Our Maryland group, called UMCP Peace Forum, organized at least two small but successful rallies and marches on campus, and also coordinated with national groups to help put together a huge march in Washington, D.C. in October 2002.

I learned then how much went into it—the permits, making all the signs, finding enough port-a-johns, getting the word out, the bus coordination—and it turned into the largest antiwar demonstration the city had seen since Vietnam. The next morning I raced for the Washington Post—the print version was still all that mattered—and was stunned to see it buried on something like page A17. (It’s still online, you can read it here.)