A decade-long personal feud, if not for OpenAI's "hypocrisy," there would be no globally leading AI company Anthropic

Original Article Title: "The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI"

Original Article Author: Keach Hagey

Reporter Keach Hagey of The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy investigative report, revealing for the first time the decade-long personal feud between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI through extensive interviews with current and former employees, executives, and associates. Shaping the global AI landscape is not just a battle of technical approaches, but also an unhealed personal wound.

In recent months, Dario Amodei's internal language has been far more intense than his public remarks. He likened Sam Altman and Elon Musk's legal dispute to a "Hitler vs. Stalin" conflict, described OpenAI President Greg Brockman's $25 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC as "evil," and compared OpenAI and other competitors to "tobacco companies selling products they know are harmful."

After the Pentagon dispute escalated, he again referred to OpenAI as "mendacious" on Slack, writing, "These facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I have seen all too often in Sam Altman."

Internally, Anthropic refers to this brand strategy as creating a "healthy alternative" to competitors, and a subtly mocking ad that ran during the Super Bowl this year, targeting OpenAI's inclusion of ads in chatbots, is a public manifestation of this strategy.

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 often visited due to his friendship with Daniela. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Daniela's then-fiancé and effective altruism philanthropist Holden Karnofsky sat together debating the right path for AI development: Brockman believed that all Americans should be told what is happening at the forefront of AI, while Dario and Karnofsky believed that sensitive information should be reported to the government before being broadcast to the public. This disagreement later became the watershed of the philosophical paths of the two companies.

Impressed by OpenAI's team, Dario joined in mid-2016, staying up late with Brockman to train AI agents to play video games. However, over the course of four years working together, conflicts over power and belonging deepened. In 2017, OpenAI's main funder at the time, Musk, demanded a list of each employee's contributions and used it as a basis for layoffs, with 10% to 20% of the 60-person team being laid off one by one. Dario saw this as cruel, and one of those laid off later became a co-founder of Anthropic.

That same year, the ethics advisor hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between AI companies and governments. Brockman then extrapolated the idea of "selling AGI to the United Nations Security Council," which Dario considered almost treasonous, leading him to briefly contemplate resigning.

In 2018, after Musk's departure, Altman took over leadership. He and Dario reached a consensus that employees lacked confidence in Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever's leadership. Dario agreed to stay on the condition that the two no longer oversee him, but he soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised the latter two the right to fire him, creating conflicting commitments.

Following the launch of the GPT series development, the most intense conflict erupted within the executive team over who could participate in the language model project. Dario, then the research director, did not allow Brockman to intervene. Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign from her leadership position, dragging Radford's personal preferences into the executive proxy war.

Dario's credentials soared with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt Altman downplayed his contribution. When Brockman appeared on a podcast discussing OpenAI's charter, Dario was angry for not being invited despite his greater contribution to the charter. Similarly, he was displeased to learn that Brockman and Altman were going to meet former President Obama but had excluded him.

The conflict escalated dramatically during a confrontational meeting in a conference room. Altman summoned the Amodei siblings to the meeting room, accusing them of inciting colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. The siblings denied it. Altman said the information came from another executive, and Daniela immediately brought that executive in for questioning, who claimed to have no knowledge of it.

Altman promptly denied ever making such a statement, leading to a heated argument. In early 2020, Altman requested executives to conduct peer reviews. Brockman wrote a strongly worded feedback accusing Daniela of power abuse and using bureaucratic processes to exclude dissent, which Altman pre-approved as "tough but fair." Daniela countered each point, escalating the argument to the point where Brockman briefly suggested retracting the comments.

By the end of 2020, the team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela taking the lead in negotiating departure matters with lawyers. Altman personally went to Dario's home to persuade him to stay, but Dario insisted on only reporting directly to the board and made it clear he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving, he wrote a lengthy memorandum dividing the AI company into "market-driven" and "public-benefit-driven" categories, believing the ideal ratio was 75% public benefit and 25% market. Several weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly a dozen employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.

Five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion and are racing to go public. During the group photo at the February AI Summit in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Modi raised his hands high with the presence of tech leaders, while Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, awkwardly opting for an elbow bump.

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