SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 -- The debate Dario Amodei chose to have on X last weekend was, on its surface, a garden-variety tech-platform argument: an investor told the Anthropic chief executive he needed to stop being so worried about artificial intelligence in public, and Amodei pushed back. The actual content of that pushback, though, was more revealing than any messaging strategist would recommend.

"I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust," Amodei wrote, framing public resistance to AI as a product of broader institutional skepticism. "I think that ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over."

That characterization of public skep...