What Does Dario Really Want?

Source: Original post by James Zhang (@james_zhang03)

In November 1889, Edison published "The Dangers of Electric Lighting" in The North American Review. Edison was already in the electricity business. The point of the article was to play up how lethal electric current could be, but the real target was Westinghouse Electric, a formidable rival that had just recruited Nikola Tesla and was betting big on alternating current. The clash between Edison's direct current and Westinghouse's AC — the famous "War of Currents" — ended in AC's total victory. Edison lost control of his own company.

Over a century later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has spent years in public warning about the catastrophic risks of AI. He went further: actively calling on the U.S. government to set up a regulatory body with the authority to ban frontier models. This ultimately led to Fable 5 being banned by the federal government just three days after launch. The ban has since been lifted, but the fallout has been enormous.

Most people see this as a classic case of "don't spit in the well you drink from." The ridicule writes itself: Dario lobbied for a regulator that could ban frontier models. The government showed it had that power. And the first model banned is Anthropic's own.

Fair enough. But it still doesn't quite make sense.

Take Edison. His motives were transparent. It’s just business, the goal is just to take out a competitor. Dario's behavior, by contrast, makes no sense for the CEO of an AI model company.

The charitable read: as someone running a frontier AI lab, he felt a social responsibility to invite government oversight, to prevent dangerously powerful AI from becoming a public safety problem. Voluntarily handing the whip to the government. But is it really that simple? Pure scientific altruism?

Let's rewind a hundred years. The War of Currents between Edison and Tesla was effectively over by 1890. In 1895, the Niagara Falls hydroelectric station came online, marking AC's definitive win. Edison had already lost control of his company three years earlier, when it merged with Thomson-Houston to form General Electric.

Around the same time, another man lost his job too. His name was Samuel Insull, Edison's private secretary, and the future "Ishmael," a man against everyone.

After his departure, Insull accepted the presidency of Chicago Edison. The salary was a third of what he'd been making under Edison.

But he saw a much bigger opening.

Chicago at the time had nearly thirty electricity companies fighting over the same customers. None had any real scale advantage. The following year, an economic panic hit and crushed the city's smaller utilities. Insull moved fast, snapping them up at fire-sale prices. By 1895, he held an outright monopoly over his territory.

Then Insull showed a commercial genius that surpassed Edison himself. He built massive power stations to drive down unit costs and pioneered time-of-use pricing, slashing rates from 20 cents to 2.5 cents. Customers went from 5,000 to over 200,000. He kept buying, kept merging, and by 1913 had swallowed the last competitor to become Chicago's sole electricity provider.

But this was America, a country that worshipped free competition and despised monopoly. An illegal monopoly this massive was guaranteed to draw lawsuits and public fury. How could Insull keep his empire and stay on the right side of the law?

In June 1898, Insull took the podium as president of the National Electric Light Association (NELA) and delivered what was, at the time, a deeply controversial speech. His proposal: the electricity industry should submit to government regulation.

Everyone laughed. Welcoming regulation didn't just sound like bad business. It sounded un-American. Insull's central claim was blunt: "The obligations of monopoly must be accepted."

Then he got to work. He formed a legislative policy committee inside NELA, partnered with a Supreme Court justice, and commissioned a three-volume report on the utility industry and how it should be regulated. Within months of publication, Wisconsin and New York passed laws creating public utility commissions.

The outcome: between 1905 and 1934, forty states established public utility commissions. These commissions shielded existing utilities from new competitors, officially blessing them as "natural monopolies." By 1924, Insull's empire covered a third of the continental United States, spanning 32 states, from New England to Nebraska, from the Mexican border to the Canadian border.

By now the story should be clear. Insull was no saint. His arguments had real merit; economies of scale genuinely brought electricity costs way down. But from his vantage point, pushing for government regulation boiled down to one calculation: regulated monopoly is the best deal a dominant company can get.

LLM parameter counts have already leveled off. Some models are even shrinking (MiniMax). The resources required to train large models are growing more slowly, and massive compute is shifting from training to inference, powering the growing demand for applications. Hardware keeps getting better. Zhipu's latest model, GLM 5.2, can run on a single Mac. Once models start landing in individual hands, once a garage team of five can train their own, the giants' grip on the market faces a real threat. The only defense is regulation. Get the government to treat large models as a safety risk that requires oversight, and you've built a wall that keeps the upstarts out.

Today's AI giants love the line: "We want to make AI as accessible as electricity." And sure, cheap electricity benefits everyone. But how many people stop to notice the staggering monopoly profits behind the power grid?