Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he’s at “peace” with where the Anthropic-OpenAI rivalry stands even as a cold war brews between two of the world’s largest AI companies.
But he did throw some shade Sam Altman’s way.
“At the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don’t have the same vision and you don’t trust them?” Amodei said in an apparent jab at the OpenAI CEO during a lengthy Bloomberg interview for “The Circuit with Emily Chang” published on Wednesday.
“The way to resolve it is you go off and do your thing, they go off and do their thing,” he said. “And I am completely at peace with the idea that we’re doing things our way and they’re doing things their way.”
Ultimately, someone else will decide who was right, Amodei said.
“We’ll see who wins in the market and we’ll see who wins in the court of public opinion,” he said. “I think those things speak louder than any drama about why who left what.”
As Chang told Amodei, the story behind why he, his sister Daniela, and nine OpenAI employees left in 2020 to start Anthropic has become Silicon Valley “lore.” Once the underdog, Anthropic is now widely viewed as having overtaken OpenAI in the generative AI race.
Amodei’s exit has received renewed attention in the wake of Ronan Farrow’s exposé in The New Yorker that examined whether Altman could be trusted. Amodei’s contemporaneous notes, which he took about his interactions with Altman during his time at OpenAI, are cited throughout the report. Days after the report’s publication, Altman’s home was attacked, an incident he partially blamed on The New Yorker report (without naming the publication directly), and later on how Anthropic talks about OpenAI.
“I think the doomerism talk hasn’t helped. I think the way certain other labs talk about us hasn’t helped,” Altman said during an April episode of the “Core Memory” podcast, adding, “I think the way Anthropic talks about OpenAI doesn’t help.”
Amodei chalked up the most viral moment in his rivalry with Altman, when the pair notably declined to join their fellow industry leaders in a show of unity, to the “extreme disorganization” of the India AI summit. The Anthropic CEO said other summits featuring world leaders are often a mess as well.
“Look, I don’t know what to tell you, OK? There was like Narendra Modi up there suddenly telling everyone to hold hands,” Amodei said of the Indian Prime Minister, who was positioned right next to Altman and Amodei. (Left unsaid is that both Altman and Amodei held hands with the other people next to them.)
While he did not name Altman directly, Amodei appeared to implicitly criticize OpenAI on multiple occasions during his over 1-hour interview with Chang.
Asked about how the world could trust AI companies to cooperate on major AI safety issues, Amodei suggested it was less about everyone getting along and more about who sets the agenda.
“What I think needs to happen is that the trustworthy actors need to get together and put the untrustworthy actors in a position where they kind of have to adopt the same standards,” he said. “With a lot of experience, I’ve learned that there are some folks who don’t do the right thing on their own, but if there’s a majority of the industry that’s doing the right thing, then I think the rest of the industry is kind of — they’re left in a position where there’s not much they can do.”
Amodei made it clear that the narrative that “no one trusts each other” in AI isn’t true, citing his relationship with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
“I’ve known him for 15 years. We’ve worked together on a number of issues,” Amodei said. “We buy compute from Google. We swap safety ideas all the time. So my view of this is that one, there are some players who are more trustworthy than others, and I think there are players outside Anthropic who I trust, who I see as trustworthy.”
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