Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published a long-form investigative report, systematically disclosing for the first time, through extensive interviews with current and former employees and people close to executives at both companies, the decade-long personal feud between the founders of Anthropic and OpenAI. What shaped the global AI landscape was not just a battle over technological roadmaps, but also a never-healed personal wound.
Dario Amodei's rhetoric internally in recent months has been far more intense than in public. He compared Sam Altman's legal dispute with Elon Musk to "Hitler vs. Stalin," called OpenAI President Greg Brockman's $2.5 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC "evil," and likened OpenAI and other competitors to "tobacco companies selling products they know are harmful."
After the Pentagon dispute escalated, he wrote on Slack calling OpenAI "mendacious," stating, "These facts indicate a pattern of behavior I have seen repeatedly in Sam Altman."
Internally, Anthropic refers to this branding strategy as creating a "healthy alternative" to its competitor. An ad during this year's Super Bowl, which implicitly mocked OpenAI for embedding ads in its chatbot, is a public manifestation of this strategy.
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 there, and OpenAI co-founder Brockman often visited due to his personal friendship with Daniela. One day, Brockman, Dario, and Daniela's then-fiancé, effective altruism philanthropist Holden Karnofsky, sat together arguing about the right path for AI development: Brockman believed all Americans should be informed about what was happening at the AI frontier, while Dario and Karnofsky believed sensitive information should be reported to the government first, not broadcast to the public. This disagreement later became the philosophical dividing line between the two companies.
Impressed by OpenAI's talent roster, Dario joined in mid-2016, staying up late with Brockman training AI agents to play video games. But over four years of working together, conflicts deepened around power and a sense of belonging. In 2017, Musk, OpenAI's main funder at the time, demanded a list of each employee's contributions and conducted layoffs based on it. About 10% to 20% of the roughly 60-person team were fired one by one. Dario saw this as cruel; one of those laid off later became an Anthropic co-founder.
That same year, an ethics advisor hired by Dario proposed that OpenAI act as a coordinating entity between AI companies and the government. Brockman extrapolated from this the idea of "selling AGI to the nuclear powers on the UN Security Council." Dario considered this近乎叛国 (close to treasonous) and once considered resigning.
After Musk exited in 2018, Altman took over leadership. He and Dario agreed that employees lacked confidence in the leadership of Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dario stayed on the condition that the two would no longer be his supervisors, but soon discovered that Altman had simultaneously promised the latter two the authority to fire him—two contradictory promises.
After the development of the GPT series began, the most intense conflict among executives erupted over who could work on 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 were caught in a proxy war among the executives.
Dario's seniority grew with the success of GPT-2 and GPT-3, but he felt Altman downplayed his contributions. He was angry when Brockman went on a podcast to discuss the OpenAI charter, feeling his greater contribution to the charter warranted an invitation; he was similarly displeased to learn that Brockman and Altman were meeting former President Obama but excluded him.
The conflict came to a head in a confrontational meeting. Altman called the Amodei siblings into a conference room, accusing them of encouraging colleagues to submit negative feedback about him to the board. They denied it. Altman said the information came from another executive. Daniela immediately called that executive in to confront them, and the person said they knew nothing about it.
Altman then denied having said that. A fierce argument ensued. In early 2020, Altman asked executives to write peer reviews for each other. Brockman wrote a strongly worded review accusing Daniela of abusing power and using bureaucratic processes to exclude dissenters; Altman previewed it and called it "tough but fair." Daniela rebutted it point by point. The argument escalated to the point where Brockman once proposed withdrawing the review.
At the end of 2020, the team centered around Dario decided to leave, with Daniela leading negotiations with lawyers regarding their departure. Altman personally went to Dario's home to persuade him to stay. Dario proposed reporting directly only to the board and explicitly stated he could not work with Brockman. Before leaving, he wrote a long memo dividing AI companies into "market-oriented" and "public benefit-oriented" types, suggesting the ideal mix was 75% public benefit, 25% market. 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 and are racing to be the first to IPO. During the group photo at the closing of the AI summit in New Delhi this February, Indian Prime Minister Modi and the tech leaders present raised their hands high. Amodei and Altman chose not to participate, only awkwardly bumping elbows.
