The virtual biologist and discovery acceleration

In this episode of Incumbents and Insurgents, Eric Larsen speaks with Dario Amodei, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthropic, about what happens when rapidly improving AI systems meet a healthcare sector built for stability and caution. They discuss the pace of model progress, why healthcare’s labor intensity and administrative burden make it especially exposed, and where AI is already acting as a clinical second opinion. The conversation spans physician workflows, biomedical discovery, and the gap between invention and diffusion, before turning to what increasingly capable machines mean for human judgment, creativity, and the role of the humanities in an age of abundant intelligence.