Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey 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, as well as associates of top executives. Shaping the global AI landscape involves not only a debate over technical approaches but also an unresolved personal trauma.
In recent months, Dario Amodei's internal language has been much more intense than in public. He likened the legal dispute between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to "Hitler vs. Stalin," 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 harmful products knowingly."
After the Pentagon dispute escalated, he referred to OpenAI as "mendacious" on Slack, writing, "These facts point to a behavior pattern that I have repeatedly seen in Sam Altman."
Internally, Anthropic refers to this branding strategy as creating a "healthy alternative" to competitors, and a subtly mocking ad during the Super Bowl this year, although not explicitly named, targeting OpenAI's use of ads in chatbots, is a public manifestation of this strategy.
The story begins in 2016 in a shared living room 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, effective altruism philanthropist Holden Karnofsky, sat together in a heated debate about the right path for AI development: Brockman believed that all Americans should be informed about the cutting-edge AI happenings, while Dario and Karnofsky believed that sensitive information should be reported to the government first rather than broadcast to the public. This divergence later became a watershed moment in the philosophical paths of the two companies.
Impressed by OpenAI's team, Dario joined in mid-2016 and stayed up late with Brockman to train AI agents to play video games. However, after four years of working together, conflicts surrounding power and ownership only deepened. In 2017, OpenAI's main funder at the time, Musk, demanded a list of each employee's contributions and based on that, initiated layoffs. About 10% to 20% of the 60-person team were individually dismissed, which Dario saw as cruel, with one of the later-dismissed individuals becoming a co-founder of Anthropic.
That same year, the ethical advisor hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between AI companies and governments. From this, Brockman extrapolated the idea of "selling AGI to the United Nations Security Council's nuclear-armed countries." Dario considered this almost treasonous and briefly thought about resigning.
In 2018, after Musk's departure, Altman took over leadership. He and Dario reached a consensus: employees lacked confidence in Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever's leadership. Dario agreed to stay on the condition that the two no longer oversaw him, but he soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised the other two that they had the right to fire him, creating a contradictory situation.
Following the launch of the GPT series development, the most intense conflict erupted among the executives regarding who could participate in the language model project. As the Research Director at the time, Dario did not allow Brockman to interfere. Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as the lead, pulling 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 that Altman downplayed his contributions. When Brockman appeared on a podcast discussing OpenAI's charter, Dario was angry for not being invited despite his greater contribution to the charter. He was equally displeased to learn that Brockman and Altman were going to meet with former President Obama, excluding him.
The conflict escalated dramatically during a confrontation in a meeting room. Altman called in the Amodei siblings, accusing them of inciting colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. The siblings denied the accusation. Altman said the information came from another executive, prompting Daniela to call in that executive on the spot for confrontation, only for the executive to deny any knowledge of it.
Altman immediately denied saying such things, leading to a heated argument between the parties. In early 2020, Altman asked the executives to conduct peer reviews, and Brockman wrote a strongly-worded review accusing Daniela of abusing power and using bureaucratic processes to exclude dissenting voices. Altman had previously reviewed it as "tough but fair." Daniela rebutted 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 depart, with Daniela leading the negotiations with lawyers for their departure. Altman personally visited Dario's home to try to retain him. Dario proposed only reporting directly to the board and made it clear that he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving, he wrote a lengthy memo dividing AI companies into "market-driven" and "public-interest-driven" categories, believing the ideal ratio to be 75% public interest and 25% market. Several weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly twelve employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.
Five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion and are competing to go public. At the closing photo of the New Delhi AI Summit in February this year, Indian Prime Minister Modi raised his hands with the tech leaders present, while Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, awkwardly opting for an elbow bump.
