When Dario Amodei and a group of OpenAI employees left to found Anthropic, Amodei filled the role of “smart professor,” openly discussing his thoughts on Slack (and trusting employees to keep what he said confidential.)
That openness has persisted even as Anthropic has transformed from a small research group into a massive company raising tens of billions of dollars from a host of profit-hungry investors.
Today, Anthropic is so big and powerful that everything its CEO says is likely to become a news story. That’s especially true now, as the company is locked in a battle of wills with the U.S. military over the use of its artificial intelligence models.
For a moment, anthropic seemed to have the upper hand. Its stance against the use of artificial intelligence for surveillance has received strong support from fans, who wrote messages of encouragement in chalk outside the company’s headquarters. The White House is working on a way to de-escalate the situation so that the military can continue to use needed technology and Anthropic can continue to develop critical national security tools, according to people involved in the discussions.
But on Wednesday, everything changed. A leaked memo written by Amodei, obtained by The Information, accuses rival OpenAI and calls Trump a petty dictator. The government was so angry that the memo urged them to make good on their pledges, threatening to list the company as a supply chain risk, which could be devastating to the company’s bottom line, according to people familiar with the matter.
“I don’t want Lockheed Martin using their models to design weapons for me if their models have this kind of policy bias based on their constitution, their culture, their people, etc.,” Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said in a podcast on Friday. “Boeing wants to use Anthropic to make commercial airplanes — go ahead. Boeing wants to use it to make fighter jets — I can’t do that because I don’t believe what the output will be because they’re too wedded to their policy preferences.”
While Anthropos will likely take on the Pentagon in court, there’s no need for Amodei to add fuel to the fire with a memo that will no doubt leak. Everyone in the company already knew how he felt from the public protest. On Thursday, in an effort to appease the White House, Amodei apologized, saying it did not reflect his “cautious or considered views.”
The truth is, Amodai is a quick learner. He quickly adapted to the fact that he no longer ran a research organization. It would be short-sighted for the board to replace Amodai with a professional manager – especially if he emerges from the woods as a more mature and calculating CEO. The key is whether Anthropic can save his soul in the process.
