10 Years of Grudges: If OpenAI hadn’t been dishonest, there wouldn’t be Anthropic’s strength

The Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published a lengthy investigation revealing the decade-long personal feud between Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This article is based on Keach Hagey’s piece “The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI,” edited and translated by BlockBeats.
(Background: 360 Xu Hongyi: Tokens can never be like unlimited mobile data; AI will only get more expensive the more you use it.)
(Additional background: “The Risks of AI to Democracy and Human Society”: A heavyweight paper co-authored by AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and 25 other scholars.)

The Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published a long investigative report, disclosing for the first time through extensive interviews with current and former employees and executives of both companies the personal feud that has persisted for a decade between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI. What shapes the global AI landscape is not just a dispute over technical direction, but also a never-healed personal trauma.

In recent months, Dario Amodei’s internal rhetoric has been much sharper than in public. He compared the legal dispute between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to “Hitler vs. Stalin,” calling OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s $25 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC “evil,” and likening OpenAI and other competitors to “tobacco companies that knowingly sell harmful products.”

After tensions escalated with the Pentagon, he referred to OpenAI as “mendacious” on Slack, writing, “These facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I have frequently seen in Sam Altman.”

Internally, Anthropic refers to this branding strategy as creating a “healthy alternative” to competitors, exemplified by an unnamed ad that mocked OpenAI for embedding advertisements in its chatbot during this year’s Super Bowl.

The story begins in 2016 in the living room of a shared house on Delano Street in San Francisco. Dario and his sister Daniela Amodei lived there, and OpenAI co-founder Brockman frequently visited due to his close relationship with Daniela. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Daniela’s then-fiancé, effective altruism philanthropist Holden Karnofsky, sat together debating the correct path for AI development: Brockman believed the entire American public should be informed about what was happening at the forefront of AI, while Dario and Karnofsky thought sensitive information should be reported to the government first rather than broadcast to the public. This disagreement later became a dividing line in the philosophical directions of the two companies.

Moved by OpenAI’s talent pool, Dario joined in mid-2016 and stayed up late with Brockman training AI systems to play video games. However, after four years of working together, tensions surrounding power and a sense of belonging deepened. In 2017, when major OpenAI funder Musk demanded a list of every employee’s contributions to justify layoffs, about 10% to 20% of the 60-member team were individually fired, which Dario viewed as cruel; one of the dismissed later became a co-founder of Anthropic.

In the same year, an ethics consultant hired by Dario suggested that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between AI companies and the government, from which Brockman extrapolated the idea of “selling AGI to the nuclear powers of the UN Security Council,” which Dario considered almost treasonous and even contemplated resigning.

After Musk’s exit in 2018, Altman took over leadership. He and Dario reached a consensus: employees lacked confidence in the leadership of Brockman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dario agreed to stay on the condition that the two were no longer in charge but soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised the two that they had the authority to fire him, creating contradictory commitments.

After the development of the GPT series was initiated, the most intense conflict erupted over who could participate in the language model project. Then-research director Dario did not allow Brockman to get involved, and Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as project leader, dragging Radford’s personal willingness into the executive proxy war.

Dario’s credentials soared with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt Altman downplayed his contributions. When Brockman discussed the OpenAI charter on a podcast, Dario was furious for not being invited despite his greater contributions to the charter; he was similarly displeased to learn that Brockman and Altman were meeting with former President Obama while excluding him.

The conflict escalated during a confrontation in a meeting room. Altman called the Amodei siblings into the room and accused them of inciting colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. Both denied it. Altman claimed the information came from another executive, and Daniela immediately called that executive in to confront him, who stated he was completely unaware.

Altman promptly denied having said that, resulting in a heated argument. In early 2020, Altman asked executives to write peer reviews of each other; Brockman wrote a harshly worded critique accusing Daniela of abusing power and excluding dissent through bureaucratic processes, which Altman reviewed beforehand, deeming it “tough but fair.” Daniela rebutted each point, escalating the argument to the point where Brockman temporarily suggested retracting the critique.

By the end of 2020, a team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela leading negotiations with lawyers regarding their departures. Altman personally visited Dario’s home to persuade him to stay, but Dario insisted on only reporting directly to the board and clearly stated he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving, he wrote a lengthy memo categorizing AI companies into “market-oriented” and “public interest-oriented,” believing the ideal ratio was 75% public interest and 25% market. Weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly twelve employees left OpenAI to establish Anthropic.

Today, five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion and are racing to go public. During a concluding group photo at the AI summit in New Delhi this February, Indian Prime Minister Modi and the technology leaders present raised their hands, while Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, awkwardly bumping elbows instead.