Anthropic's Dario Amodei Gets the SNL Weekend Update Treatment

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is now an SNL character. On the September 27, 2026 Weekend Update, cast member Jane Wickline debuted an Amodei impression, in an elaborate wig, after anchor Michael Che introduced the CEO as having "stumbled through a press tour" seemingly agreeing his own technology could harm humanity, TechCrunch reported.

Asked how Anthropic was not going to kill everyone, Wickline's Amodei kept sliding into an argument with a second, media-trained version of himself and eventually confessed, "AI is the devil and I its maker." A reassurance came out as, "AI is not a weapon, it's a tool: A tool for building weapons." The optimism was calibrated too: pressed on curing disease, the character offered, "In 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone." A separate line had the fictional CEO promising that AI leaders "are all on the same page here: We do not condone what we are doing."

The sketch caps a dense week of Amodei coverage in our feed, from a Trump White House dinner invite to reporting that early Anthropic employees are eyeing remote US land as a fallback. The press tour Che was mocking has been the other Amodei story of the week.