What shapes the global AI landscape is not just a battle over technological routes, but also a personal trauma that has never healed.
Article Author: Keach Hagey
Source: BlockBeats
(Wall Street Journal) Reporter Keach Hagey published a lengthy investigative report, systematically revealing for the first time the personal grievances that have persisted for a decade between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI, through extensive interviews with current and former employees and associates of both companies. What shapes the global AI landscape is not just a battle over technological routes, but also a personal trauma that has never healed.
Dario Amodei's internal rhetoric has been much more intense in recent months than in public settings. He likened the legal dispute between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to "Hitler vs. Stalin", calling OpenAI President Greg Brockman's $25 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC "evil", and comparing OpenAI and other competitors to "tobacco companies that knowingly sell harmful products."
After the escalation of the Pentagon dispute, he again called OpenAI "mendacious" on Slack, writing, "These facts indicate a behavioral pattern I've often seen in Sam Altman."
Anthropic internally refers to this brand strategy as creating a "healthy alternative" to competitors. During this year's Super Bowl, an unnamed advertisement mocking OpenAI for embedding ads in its chatbot was a product of this public stance.
The story begins in 2016 in the living room of a shared apartment on Delano Street in San Francisco. Dario and his sister Daniela Amodei lived here, and OpenAI co-founder Brockman often visited due to his personal friendship with Daniela. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Daniela's then-fiancé, effective altruist philanthropist Holden Karnofsky, sat together debating the correct development path for AI: Brockman believed all Americans should be informed about what was happening at the AI frontier, while Dario and Karnofsky thought 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.
Impressed by OpenAI's talent pool, Dario joined in mid-2016, staying up late with Brockman to train AI agents in video games. However, after four years of collaboration, conflicts over power and a sense of belonging deepened. In 2017, when OpenAI's main funder Musk requested a list of each employee's contributions for layoffs, about 10% to 20% of the 60-person team were dismissed one by one. Dario viewed this as cruel; one of the laid-off individuals later became a co-founder of Anthropic.
In the same year, an ethics consultant hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between AI companies and the government. Brockman extrapolated the idea of "selling AGI to the nuclear powers of the United Nations Security Council," which Dario considered almost treasonous and briefly 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 would no longer be in charge but soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised the two that they had the right to fire him, creating a contradictory situation.
After the launch of the GPT series development, intense conflicts erupted among executives over who could participate in the language model project. At that time, research director Dario did not allow Brockman to interfere, while Daniela, who co-led the project with Alec Radford, threatened to resign as the head. Radford's personal wishes became entangled in the executive proxy war.
Dario's credentials rose with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt that Altman downplayed his contributions. When Brockman discussed OpenAI's charter on a podcast, Dario was angry for not being invited despite his significant contributions to the charter; he was also displeased to learn that Brockman and Altman were meeting former President Obama while excluding him.
The conflict escalated completely during a confrontation in a meeting room. Altman called the Amodei siblings into the room, accusing them of inciting colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. The two denied it. Altman claimed the information came from another executive, and Daniela promptly called that executive in to confront him, who said he was completely unaware.
Altman immediately denied having said those words, and both sides had a heated argument. In early 2020, Altman requested executives to write peer reviews of each other. Brockman wrote a strongly worded feedback accusing Daniela of abusing power and using bureaucratic processes to exclude dissenters, which Altman pre-reviewed and described as "tough but fair." Daniela rebutted each point, and the argument escalated to the point where Brockman once proposed retracting his comments.
By the end of 2020, the team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela leading negotiations with lawyers for their departure. Altman personally visited Dario's home to persuade him to stay, but Dario insisted on only reporting directly to the board and clearly stated that he could not work with Brockman. Before his departure, he wrote a lengthy memo categorizing AI companies into "market-oriented" and "public interest-oriented" types, believing the ideal ratio was 75% public interest and 25% market. A few weeks later, Dario, Daniela, and nearly a dozen employees left OpenAI to found Anthropic.
Five years later, both companies are valued at over 300 billion dollars and are competing to go public. During a group photo at the conclusion of the AI summit in New Delhi in February of this year, Indian Prime Minister Modi held up his hands with the tech leaders present, while Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, awkwardly bumping elbows instead.