WTF?! Generative AI company executives have made plenty of bold promises about what their technologies can do, despite much of the general public's opinion of AI ranging from apathetic to hostile. But the CEO of Anthropic is trying to inflate AI's abilities by claiming it will help double human lifespans within five to ten years.
Speaking during a panel titled "Technology in the World" at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Anthropic's Dario Amoedi said, "If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy."
That's a pretty big claim, but who's to say what could happen in the far future. However, Amoedi finished off his statement with a prediction that would generously be called audacious. "And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to ten years."
"So that's kind of the grand vision. At Anthropic, we are thinking about, you know, what's the first step towards that vision, right? If we're two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that."
Amoedi has a Ph.D. in biophysics from Princeton and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, so it's not as if he's inexperienced in this field, though he admitted that "this is not a very exact science."
Being CEO of an AI company means Amoedi's always going to inflate the abilities of artificial intelligence for the sake of hype, of course. The average life expectancy in the US is 77.4 years (as of 2022). Finding ways to push that to almost 155 years before the end of 2030 is not going to happen, no matter how advanced your AI.
Amoedi's predictions for when AIs will outperform humans are also ambitious. He believes that by 2026 or 2027, "we will have AI systems that are broadly better than almost all humans at almost all things."
The Anthropic leader isn't alone in his belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which has the ability to learn, reason, and adapt across a wide range of tasks and is generally smarter than humans, will be here soon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it will be here by 2029, while SoftBank's CEO had given 2023 as a deadline. And earlier this month, OpenAI boss Sam Altman said he was confident his company can now build and deploy AGI.
One person who will likely be excited by Amoedi's claims is Bryan Johnson. The millionaire, famed for his many attempts to reverse aging and extend his life, is the subject of a Netflix documentary, Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. He recently had to stop one of the 54 different supplements he takes every day as it was making him older, not younger.