Sept. 27, 2026
The latest research says that only 24% of the American public uses AI daily. Nevertheless, the tech has gone fully mainstream in the minds of the public, and now we have proof. Last night’s Saturday Night Liveused its Weekend Update segment to give Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei the full parody treatment.
Played by SNL regular Jane Wickline, the SNL version of Amodei is simultaneously a stuttering, shifty-eyed nerd and a devious double-speaking corporate mouthpiece. Throughout the skit, SNL Amodei begs the public to stop the AI he’s building (a riff on the real Amodei’s repeated warnings), only to be interrupted by his own Lord of the Rings Gollum-style evil inner voice telling him to lie to the audience.
It’s a powerful jolt of comedy highlighting what some see as the recent absurdity of Amodei and his chief rival Sam Altman at OpenAI imploring the government to regulate their business even as they continue to release more powerful AI models. The two CEOs have recently taken their pleas to every news media channel that will platform them. But some skeptics have opined that the companies are actually trying to create a government-backed AI cartel that marginalizes smaller AI players. Likewise, government regulation that favors the top AI leaders could also tamp down the growing list of open source AI models that threaten the profit margins of Big Tech’s commercial AI models.
If SNL’s latest tech CEO roast is any indication, the public is no longer buying the AI doom marketing coming from Anthropic and OpenAI. And that means the mainstream tech discourse on AI and what to do with it is about to take a very interesting turn. and rightfully, called “AI slop.” But what happens when so-called slop delivers a distinctly critical take on technological innovation? Suddenly, it becomes a bit more difficult to ignore.
Cover: A scene from SNL via NBC
