A private feud lasting up to 10 years, if not for OpenAI's "hypocrisy," would not have led to the world's most powerful AI company, Anthropic.

Original Title: “The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI”

Original Author: Keach Hagey

Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published an extensive investigative report, which for the first time systematically reveals the decade-long personal feud between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI through numerous interviews with current and former employees and executives of both companies. What shapes the global AI landscape is not just a technological rivalry, but also a never-healed personal trauma.

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

After the escalation of the Pentagon dispute, he called OpenAI “hypocritical” on Slack, writing, “These facts indicate a behavioral pattern I have frequently seen in Sam Altman.”

Internally, Anthropic refers to this branding strategy as creating a “healthy alternative” to competitors, and a satirical ad during this year’s Super Bowl that did not name OpenAI but mocked its embedding of ads in chatbots is a product of this public stance.

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

After being impressed by OpenAI’s talent pool, Dario joined in mid-2016, staying up late training AI agents to play video games with Brockman. However, after four years of working together, the conflicts surrounding power and a sense of belonging deepened. In 2017, when major OpenAI investor Musk requested a list of each employee’s contributions to determine layoffs, about 10% to 20% of the 60-person team was laid off one by one, which Dario viewed as cruel; one of the laid-off employees later became a co-founder of Anthropic.

That same year, an ethics advisor 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.” Dario considered this almost treasonous and contemplated resigning.

After Musk stepped down 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 no longer had oversight, but soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised both of them the right to fire him, creating a contradiction.

After the launch of the GPT series, the executive team erupted into the most intense conflicts over who could participate in the language model project. As the then-research director, Dario did not allow Brockman to interfere, and Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as the leader. Radford’s personal interests became entangled in the proxy war among executives.

Dario’s credentials soared with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt that Altman downplayed his contributions. Dario was angry when Brockman discussed the OpenAI charter on a podcast without inviting him, despite his greater contributions to the charter; he was also dissatisfied to learn that Brockman and Altman were meeting former President Obama while excluding him.

The conflict intensified during a confrontation in a conference room. Altman called the Amodei siblings into the room, accusing 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 called that executive in to confront him, who said he was completely unaware.

Altman immediately denied having said that, and a heated argument ensued. In early 2020, Altman requested executives to write peer reviews for each other, and Brockman wrote a strongly worded feedback accusing Daniela of abusing power and using bureaucratic processes to exclude dissenters. Altman reviewed it in advance, commenting it was “tough but fair.” Daniela refuted each point, escalating the argument to the point where Brockman once proposed retracting his comments.

By the end of 2020, a team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela leading the negotiations with lawyers for their departure. Altman personally went to Dario’s home to persuade him to stay, but Dario insisted he would only accept reporting directly to the board and made it clear 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 should be 75% public interest and 25% market. Weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly a dozen employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.

Now, five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion, competing to be the first to go public. At the closing group photo of the AI summit in New Delhi this February, Indian Prime Minister Modi raised his hands with the tech leaders present, while Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, awkwardly bumping elbows instead.

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