Original Title: The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI
Original author: Keach Hagey
Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published an in-depth investigative report, revealing for the first time a decade-long personal feud between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI, based on extensive interviews with current and former employees and associates of both companies. The shaping of the global AI landscape is driven not only by competing technical paths but also by an unhealed personal wound.
Over the past few months, Dario Amodei’s internal language has been far more intense than his public statements. He compared Sam Altman’s legal dispute with Elon Musk to “Hitler versus Stalin,” called OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s $25 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC “evil,” and likened OpenAI and other competitors to “tobacco companies knowingly selling harmful products.”
After the Pentagon dispute escalated, he again called OpenAI "mendacious" on Slack, writing, "These facts reveal a pattern of behavior I've often seen in Sam Altman."
Anthropic internally refers to this branding strategy as creating a "healthy alternative" to competitors; a recent Super Bowl ad that subtly mocked OpenAI for embedding ads in its chatbot is the public manifestation of this approach.
The story begins in the living room of a shared house on Delano Street in San Francisco in 2016. Dario lived there with his sister Daniela Amodei, and OpenAI co-founder Brockman frequently visited due to his personal friendship with Daniela. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Holden Karnofsky—Daniela’s then-fiancé and a effective altruism philanthropist—sat down to debate the right path for AI development: Brockman believed the American public should be informed about what was happening at the frontier of AI, while Dario and Karnofsky argued that sensitive information should first be reported to the government rather than broadcast to the public. This divergence later became the philosophical dividing line between the two companies.
After being impressed by OpenAI’s roster of talent, Dario joined in mid-2016 and stayed up late with Brockman training AI agents to play video games. But after four years of working together, tensions over power and belonging deepened. In 2017, OpenAI’s primary funder Musk requested a breakdown of each employee’s contributions and proceeded to lay off 10% to 20% of the roughly 60-person team, one by one; Dario saw this as cruel, and one of those laid off later became a co-founder of Anthropic.
In the same year, the ethics consultant hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI serve as a coordinating entity between AI companies and governments; Brockman extrapolated from this the idea of “selling AGI to the nuclear powers of the UN Security Council,” which Dario viewed as nearly treasonous and at one point considered resigning.
After Musk stepped down in 2018, Altman took over leadership. He reached an agreement with Dario: employees lacked confidence in the leadership of Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dario agreed to stay on the condition that neither of them would remain in charge, but soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised both that they had the authority to fire him—creating a contradiction between the two promises.
After the GPT series development was launched, senior leadership erupted in its most intense conflict over who could participate in the language model project. Dario, then Research Director, barred Brockman from involvement; Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as lead; Radford’s personal wishes became entangled in the executive-level proxy war.
Dario’s credentials rose with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt Altman downplayed his contributions. When Brockman discussed OpenAI’s charter on a podcast, Dario was furious for not being invited despite having made a greater contribution to the charter; he was also upset to learn that Brockman and Altman were meeting former President Obama without including him.
The conflict came to a head during a meeting room confrontation. Altman called the Amodei siblings into the room and accused them of encouraging colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. They denied it. Altman said the information came from another executive, but Daniela immediately summoned that executive to confront them, and the executive said they had no knowledge of it.
Altman immediately denied making these remarks, and the two engaged in a heated argument. In early 2020, Altman requested that executives conduct peer reviews of each other; Brockman submitted a strongly worded feedback accusing Daniela of abusing power and using bureaucratic processes to exclude others, which Altman had reviewed in advance and deemed “tough but fair.” Daniela rebutted each point point by point, and the dispute escalated to the point where Brockman一度 proposed withdrawing his review.
By the end of 2020, the team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela leading negotiations with lawyers regarding their departure. Altman personally visited Dario’s home to persuade him to stay; Dario insisted on reporting directly to the board and clearly stated he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving, he wrote a lengthy memo categorizing AI companies into two types: “market-driven” and “public-interest-driven,” arguing that the ideal ratio was 75% public-interest and 25% market-driven. Several weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly twelve employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.
Today, five years later, both companies are valued at over $300 billion and are racing to be the first to go public. At the closing group photo of the New Delhi AI Summit in February this year, Indian Prime Minister Modi and the tech leaders present raised their hands high, while Amodei and Altman opted not to join, merely awkwardly bumping elbows.