Anthropic CEO says spies are after $100M AI secrets in a ‘few lines of code’

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly “algorithmic secrets” from the U.S.’s top AI companies — and he wants the U.S. government to step in.

Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its “large-scale industrial espionage” and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted.

“Many of these algorithmic secrets, there are $100 million secrets that are a few lines of code,” he said. “And, you know, I’m sure that there are folks trying to steal them, and they may be succeeding.”

More help from the U.S. government to defend against this risk is “very important,” Amodei added, without specifying exactly what kind of help would be required.

Anthropic declined to comment to TechCrunch on the remarks specifically but referred to Anthropic’s recommendations to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) earlier this month.

In the submission, Anthropic argues that the federal government should partner with AI industry leaders to beef up security at frontier AI labs, including by working with U.S. intelligence agencies and their allies.

The remarks are in keeping with Amodei’s more critical stance toward Chinese AI development. Amodei has called for strong U.S. export controls on AI chips to China while saying that DeepSeek scored “the worst” on a critical bioweapons data safety test that Anthropic ran.

Amodei’s concerns, as he laid out in his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” and elsewhere, center on China using AI for authoritarian and military purposes.

This kind of stance has led to criticism from some in the AI community who argue the U.S. and China should collaborate more, not less, on AI, in order to avoid an arms race that results in either country building a system so powerful that humans can’t control it.

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