From OpenAI's “Hypocrisy” to the Rise of Anthropic: Ten Years of Grudge Rewrite the AI Power Map

Author: Keach Hagey

Original title: 10 years of personal grudge, if it weren't for OpenAI's “hypocrisy”, there wouldn't be Anthropic, the world's strongest AI company

“Wall Street Journal” reporter Keach Hagey published a lengthy investigation report. Through extensive interviews with current and former employees and people close to the executives of the two companies, the first systematic disclosure of personal grievances between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI for the first time. What is shaping the global AI landscape is not only a battle over technology routes, but also a period of personal trauma that has never healed.

Dario Amodei's internal rhetoric in recent months has been far more intense than in public. He likened Sam Altman's legal dispute with Elon Musk to a “Hitler vs. Stalin dispute,” saying OpenAI President Greg Brockman's donation of $25 million to the pro-Trump Super Political Action Committee was “evil” (evil), and compared OpenAI and other competitors to “tobacco companies that sell products that know they are harmful.”

After the Pentagon dispute escalated, he also called OpenAI “mendacious” (mendacious) on Slack and wrote, “These facts show a pattern of behavior I often see in Sam Altman.”

Anthropic internally refers to this set of brand strategies to create a competitor's “healthy alternative” (healthy alternative). An unnamed ad that satirized OpenAI embedded ads in chatbots during this year's Super Bowl was a product of its disclosure.

The story begins in the living room of a shared house on Delano Street in San Francisco in 2016. Dario lives here with her sister Daniela Amodei, and Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, often visits with Daniela because of his personal relationship. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Daniela's fiance at the time, Holden Karnofsky, an effective altruist philanthropist, sat together to argue about the proper development path of AI: Brockman thought all Americans should be told what was happening at the AI frontier, while Dario and Karnofsky thought that sensitive information should first be reported to the government rather than broadcast to the public. This disagreement later became a watershed in the philosophical lines of the two companies.

Impressed by OpenAI's talent lineup, Dario joined in mid-2016 to stay up late training AI agents to play video games with Brockman. However, after four years of working together, the conflict around power and sense of belonging continues to deepen. In 2017, Musk, the main funder of OpenAI at the time, asked to list each employee's contribution and lay off employees based on this. 10% to 20% of the team of about 60 people were fired one by one. Dario treated this as cruel, and one of the layoffs later became the co-founder of Anthropic.

In the same year, an ethics consultant hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between the AI company and the government, and Brockman derived the idea of “selling AGI to the UN Security Council nuclear powers”. Dario thought this was almost treason, and at one point he considered resigning.

Altman took over the lead after Musk quit in 2018. He agreed with Dario: Employees lacked confidence in the leadership of Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dario stayed on the condition that the two were no longer supervisors, but soon discovered that Altman also promised the latter two that they had the right to fire themselves; the two promises were in conflict with each other.

After the GPT series development started, the most intense conflict broke out among executives over who could participate in the language model project. Dario, who was the research director at the time, did not allow Brockman to get involved. Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as the person in charge, and Radford's personal wishes were involved in a proxy war between executives.

Dario's credentials soared with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt that Altman was downplaying his contribution. When Brockman talked about the OpenAI charter on the podcast, Dario was furious because he contributed more to the charter but wasn't invited; he was also dissatisfied when he learned that Brockman and Altman were going to see former President Barack Obama but excluded themselves.

The conflict completely intensified during a confrontation in a conference room. Altman called the Amodei brother and sister into the conference room to accuse their colleagues of encouraging their colleagues to submit negative feedback about themselves to the board. The two denied it. Altman said the news came from another executive, and Daniela called the executive to confront him on the spot. The other party said he had no idea.

Altman immediately denied that he had said this, and the two sides quarreled violently. At the beginning of 2020, Altman asked executives to write peer reviews. Brockman wrote a harshly worded feedback alleging that Daniela abused power and used bureaucratic procedures to exclude dissidents, and Altman judged “tough but fair” in advance. Daniela retorted one by one, and the dispute escalated to Brockman's proposal to withdraw his comments.

At the end of 2020, the team, with Dario at the core, decided to leave, and Daniela took the lead in negotiating the separation with the lawyer. Altman personally took care of Dario, who proposed to only accept direct reports to the board of directors and made it clear that he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving his job, he wrote a long memo, dividing AI companies into “market type” and “public interest type”, believing that the ideal ratio is 75% public interest and 25% market. A few weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly a dozen employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.

Today, five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion and are vying to take the lead in IPOs. When taking a group photo at the closing of the AI summit in New Delhi in February this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held up their hands with the tech leaders present. Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, but only embarrassingly hit elbows.

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