Dario Amodei thinks and talks a lot about the risks of powerful AI.

Judge as of 2015-08-17. True: there is a record from before or around that date of Amodei discussing AI risk substantively and repeatedly. Examples are writing or co-authoring on AI safety (such as work leading to 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety'), talks, interviews, posts, or credible accounts of his engagement with AI risk communities. Mostly true: there is clear evidence of real engagement but it was limited in volume before August 2015. Mixed: the evidence shows only occasional engagement. Mostly false: the evidence shows minimal or incidental engagement, presented as a major focus. False: evidence shows he did not engage with AI risk topics at that time.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Dario Amodei - Wikipedia Wikipedia

   “From November 2014 until October 2015, he worked at Baidu.”

2. E2 Dario Amodei: The physicist who bet the lab on the curve keep-thinking.com

   “In 2014 he joined Baidu's Silicon Valley AI lab under Andrew Ng, working on speech recognition, and was a co-author on Deep Speech 2 in 2015.”

3. E3 Dario Amodei: The physicist who bet the lab on the curve keep-thinking.com

   “Amodei has held it consistently since the Baidu years.”

4. E4 raw AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai) · 28 October 2026

   “From November 2014 to October 2015, Amodei worked at Baidu, the Chinese technology company, during a period when Baidu was aggressively expanding its AI capabilities under the leadership of Andrew Ng.”

5. E5 Dario Amodei AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai) · 28 October 2026

   “From November 2014 to October 2015, Amodei worked at Baidu, the Chinese technology company, during a period when Baidu was aggressively expanding its AI capabilities under the leadership of Andrew Ng.”

6. E6 Dario Amodei AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai) · 28 October 2026

   “His work at Baidu exposed him to the challenges of deploying deep learning systems at large scale and deepened his understanding of the rapid pace of AI progress”

7. E7 State of AI Safety 2015 Unknown (meeting agenda and attendee list, hosted on an Amazon S3 bucket) · 2015

   “Andrew Ng and a small team of AI scientists and systems engineers to solve hard problems in deep learning and AI, including speech recognition and natural language processing.”

8. E8 Transcript: Concrete Problems in AI Safety with Dario Amodei and Seth Baum - Future of Life Institute Future of Life Institute · 31 August 2016

   “Yeah, so as I got more and more interested in these safety issues, I did what any researcher does and looked into the literature that had been written in the machine learning literature so far about these problems.”

9. E9 Concrete Problems In AI Safety With Dario Amodei And Seth Baum — Future of Life Institute Podcast Future of Life Institute · 30 August 2016

   “Amodei, who now works with OpenAI, was the lead author on the recent, well-received paper Concrete Problems in AI Safety.”

E1, E2, E4 and E5 place Amodei at Baidu from November 2014 to October 2015, where E2 says he worked on speech recognition. None of them describes AI-risk discussion in that period, but their silence does not show he did not engage. E7 is a 2015 'State of AI Safety' agenda whose quote describes Baidu's lab, but the quote does not name Amodei or give a date relative to August 2015. E8 and E9 date from 2016 and show safety work without saying when it began, and the 'it' in E3 is not identified. The evidence therefore neither establishes nor rules out substantive, repeated engagement with AI risk by August 2015.