Video of Dario’s Sophomore-Year Speech Has Been Dug Up, Translated with ChatGPT

On March 10, 2003, the Pasadena City Council in California held a special meeting. During the public comment period, a college student in a gray T-shirt walked up to the microphone.

“My name is Dario Amodei, and I’m a sophomore at Caltech.”

He brought a petition opposing the Iraq War. When it was submitted the previous Thursday, 400 Caltech faculty and students had signed it; by that day, the number was close to 600. He read the petition aloud on the spot, including the line: “We create the technology that moves this country forward, and it pains us deeply to see it used indiscriminately for war.”

At the end of his remarks, he said: “Please do not stifle peaceful and exciting science. It brings jobs to this city and progress to all humanity.”

Ten days later, the Iraq War began. Eighteen years later, he co-founded Anthropic with several former OpenAI colleagues.

This two-minute speech comes from archived meeting video from the City of Pasadena. X user @dummerspast39 dug it up and added bilingual Chinese-English subtitles. When someone asked how he found it, he replied: he searched for ages with ChatGPT.

Binkg added when reposting: “I found footage of 20-year-old Dario Amodei opposing the Iraq War in 2003. That was 18 years before Anthropic was founded.”

The comment section quickly split into several camps. Some sighed, “So Anthropic’s safety-first obsession was planted back in his sophomore year”; some joked, “From a kid submitting a petition at city council to Anthropic CEO—which funding round was it that talked him out of it?”; and some just outright attacked him over his stance on China.

As for the footage itself, one number is worth noting: Caltech has only a little over two thousand students in total, and a petition went from 400 signatures to nearly 600—an increase of almost half in just a few days. That proportion would be high anywhere.

At 20, what worried him was technology made by his generation being used for war. Now he worries all day about AI being misused. The object of his worry has changed, but the way he worries hasn’t changed much.

As for the cursing in the comments, that footage probably can’t explain much. A 20-year-old college student standing at a microphone with a petition, and 18 years later an AI company CEO talking about safety at a launch event—what happened in between is not something a two-minute video can make clear.

But that video really was dug up. With ChatGPT.