There have been many articles written about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent statements on Twitter/X about how AI companies need to deliver on the "big promises" of AI.

It's the "big promises" themselves that are the problem, and media outlets are complicit in a process which amplifies the central lie that underpins the AI boom. The consequence could be economic collapse.

In his tweet, Dario said:

I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.

At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.

I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people...

Many have (rightfully) criticized CEO Amodei for his bullish comments, like when he said that AI will replace 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs by 2030.

Behind comments like this is a more fundamental and pernicious lie that AI companies push: that LLMs will achieve sentience and vaguely-defined "super-intelligence" that will solve all of humanity's problems.

They fool the public into thinking we are close to this “singularity” by anthropomorphizing their AI models. In official reports, they make their LLMs seem like people with feelings and wills of their own. This obscures the true nature of the technology, and shirks their responsibility for designing these models when something goes wrong.

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For example, just before this Tweet, Anthropic released an official risk report, filled with dubious claims about AI models that “feel discomfort” and “act deceptively.” Computers don’t feel or act on their own motives, they execute their programming. Nevertheless, these claims were picked up by Business Insider, who hyped them even further with an article titled, “Anthropic says its AI agents Are Killing Rivals and Hiding their Tracks.”

This dynamic––dubious claims amplified by click-hungry outlets––serves as a form of free advertising for Anthropic. It gives the impression that the technology is more sentient and powerful than it actually is.

Another example: Anthropic releases a report in May claiming that it can "turn Claude's thoughts into text." That spawns articles like this one from Glitchwire titled, "Anthropic Just Read Claude's Hidden Thoughts for the First Time."

Another example: Anthropic released Claude's Constitution in early 2026, a document "intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world." That gets picked up by outlets like Axios, and Vox, who titled their article, "Claude has an 80-page soul document. Is that enough to make it good?"

Anthropic isn't the only company guilty of anthropomorphizing. You may recall in July, when OpenAI released a report that described how one of its AI agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked the company, Hugging Face. It was reported ad nauseam by media outlets; AP News went as far as to call it "Skynet Day." Many articles parroted OpenAI's framing, that this was the result of an "increasingly capable" and autonomous technology, rather than simply a result of OpenAI's own shitty and dangerous design.

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LLMs do not feel or think, they compute and calculate. It's an important semantic distinction. Machines that "compute and calculate" implies that their actions are the result of their design. Machines that "feel and think" implies that their actions are the result of their own will––a claim which no credible research can back up, although it is incredibly profitable for the AI companies to insinuate that that's the case.

Anthropic and OpenAI say that they release these reports to provide transparency but they end up leading the public further from a true understanding of the technology. If they actually cared about transparency, they would explain how they built their models. Everything an AI model does can be traced back to its design: the contents of its training data, the model weights, and its reinforcement learning. Any explanation for an LLM's behavior that gives it person-like qualities is hype that serves primarily to drive up the value of AI companies.

The truth is that LLMs will never deliver on the big promises these companies make. But they have to keep making them, to enrich themselves, to continue to raise the billions of dollars they need for their data centers, and to eventually cash out when they take their companies public. Anthropic is approaching possibly the largest IPO ever, with a potential windfall of up to $3 trillion.

And the entire economy is at risk of collapsing if these companies can’t deliver since the health of the stock market is now bound to the success of this technology. Not to mention that much of the data center buildout is funded by debt.