The Anthropic–OpenAI feud and their Pentagon dispute expose a deeper problem with AI safety
Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: Trump has an AI data center problem ahead of the midterms…Don’t trust AI to file your taxes…Anthropic’s AI tool Claude is central to US campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud.
The debate around AI safety often focuses on the technology itself—how powerful models might become, or what risks they might pose. But the conflict this week involving Anthropic, OpenAI and the Pentagon points to a deeper problem: how much power over the future of AI is concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporate leaders and government officials deciding how these systems are built, deployed, and used.
For years, critics of the industry have warned about the risk of “industrial capture”—a future in which the development of powerful AI systems is concentrated among a handful of companies working closely with governments, leaving the safety of those systems dependent on the incentives and rivalries of the people running them. In 2023, for example, researcher Yoshua Bengio said the potential for the AI sector to be controlled by a few companies was the “number two problem” behind the existential risks posed by the technology.
So it’s not particularly reassuring to read yesterday about the disdain Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed towards OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in leaked memo Amodei wrote to employees on Friday. Amodei’s angry missive, which was apparently sent over Anthropic’s Slack to all its employees, came after OpenAI announced a deal to provide AI to the Pentagon and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he was declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” for failing to come to a similar deal.
Amodei called OpenAI’s messaging “mendacious,” “safety theater,” and “an example of who they really are,” while describing many of Altman’s comments as “straight up lies” and “gaslighting.”
Altman has taken his own public shots at Anthropic. He recently called one of the company’s Super Bowl campaigns “clearly dishonest” and accused it of “doublespeak.” And the rivalry has become visible in more symbolic ways as well: At a recent summit, Altman and Amodei went viral for refusing to hold hands for a group photo with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
With the US government taking little action to regulate AI—and international efforts on AI safety largely stalled—the world has effectively been relying on self-regulation by the industry. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly supported that paradigm and signed voluntary safety commitments. They have also collaborated at times to run independent safety evaluations of one another’s models prior to those models being released.
But when the leaders of the two most influential AI labs so obviously can’t seem to get along, and the competition between them is so fierce, it raises an uncomfortable question: how much cooperation on safety can we realistically expect?
The pressure of competition has already impacted both companies when it comes to AI safety. Anthropic recently revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to say it would no longer unilaterally hold back from developing a new model simply because it did not yet know how to make that model safe. And OpenAI has made its own adjustments, removing explicit bans on military and warfare uses from its policies in 2024, and shifting its focus from safety research to product development to the point that former superalignment lead Jan Leike (who left for Anthropic in mid-2024) wrote on X that at OpenAI “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
The current safety approach assumes that companies and governments will ultimately act with restraint. But the future of AI safety may ultimately depend on how a small number of powerful players navigate the pressures of competition, geopolitics, and the occasional Silicon Valley soap opera.
With that, here’s more AI news.
Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com