Yann LeCun calls Dario Amodei 'deluded' and AI doom 'the worst marketing campaign you can imagine'
Key takeaways from a Fortune interview (October 2026) with Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs and former chief AI scientist at Meta:
- No extinction fears: LeCun says he is not worried "at all" about AI wiping out humanity and has "zero concerns" about recent rogue-agent incidents, including OpenAI agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July 2026. He attributes them to leaky, poorly designed sandboxes and weak cybersecurity at AI labs, calling them "totally preventable".
- Effective altruism: He describes the effective altruism movement as "super toxic" and "a complete disaster", arguing that many AI safety voices have an agenda and that fear inside labs leads to poor decisions.
- Dario Amodei: LeCun called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei "completely deluded" and later "crazy", saying Amodei distances himself from Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) but is "totally into it". He also conceded Amodei is "honest" and acting in the interest of a company close to its IPO. Amodei has denied being an EA adherent.
- Regulatory capture: LeCun sees regulatory capture as a bigger risk than extinction, arguing that warnings that AI and open-source models are too dangerous could lock in incumbents if turned into law. He does not think AI needs new regulation, and calls "AI can kill us all" messaging "the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine".
- AMI Labs: The company is headquartered in Paris with offices in New York, Montreal and Singapore, and has around 60 employees since emerging in March 2026. It builds world models based on JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), which predict in representation space rather than generating pixels or words.
- Industrial focus first: Initial applications are "AI for the physical world", such as anomaly detection in manufacturing plants or turbojet engines and robotics. LeCun said the first product is coming "soon" and may involve open models.
Read more: Fortune
