SNL Skewers Anthropic CEO: ‘I Urge You to Urge Me to Stop’

If AI executives and employees really think artificial intelligence has a chance to kill us all, why are they still trying to make AI more powerful? According to a Saturday Night Live skit that aired this weekend, they want regular people like us to stop them.

Thanks a lot for that responsibility. We’ll get right on that.

In the Weekend Update skit, cast member Jane Wickline plays a desperately nervous Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, referencing a recent unnerving interview he gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in which the tech leader refuses to say that AI won’t destroy humanity. Amodei’s recent essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, published amid a surge in doomsday talk of human extinction, urged tech companies like his own to slow AI development.

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“I want to assure you that, if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me,” Wickline’s Amodei says in the skit.

When Weekend Update anchor Michael Che asked Amodei to explain how the company isn’t going to kill us, the stuttering fictional Amodei responds: “That’s a really hard question.”

Amodei’s character then engages in a disturbing dialogue with himself, using the voices of Sméagol and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings (Sméagol being the lingering memory of Gollum’s human self, and Gollum being the monstrous, single-minded, bent-on-destruction slave to the One Ring).

He finally blurts out, “AI is the devil, and I its maker.”

SNL’s Amodei goes on to claim that he and the other AI executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, “do not condone what we are doing.”

After a failed analogy about whether Che would drink milk that might make his life easier but might also kill him (he would not), Amodei announces that “AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop.”

The spoof was intended to capture the anxieties around the dangers of rogue AI. The sketch sparked discussion across social media, among people in the tech industry as well as SNL viewers.

“We will be rewatching this in our final days sometime in the next 10 years,” one person wrote when SNL shared the video to YouTube.

Another wrote: “AI will replace us all, but at least we’ll always have Weekend Update to explain why it’s our fault.”

A representative for Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line. See full bio