AI labs: The race between two bitter rivals – Where are Anthropic and OpenAI today?

San Francisco, Las Vegas, Düsseldorf. When Sam Altman and Dario Amodei met at the “AI Impact Summit” in New Delhi at the beginning of the year, they pointedly refused to shake hands. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited people to the summit. But instead of the announced billions in investments, after the summit the world talked about the lack of a gesture - a symbol of the broken relationship between their former colleagues.

Altman and Amodei lead two of the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) companies, OpenAI and Anthropic. Both want to win the race for the most powerful models that will drive the economy of the future. And both want to go public. Amodei is one step ahead: He published his prospectus on Monday and is about to go on the trading floor.

The rivalry between the two entrepreneurs also has to do with their shared history: Amodei led the OpenAI research team for four years. At the end of 2020 he left the ChatGPT developer and founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela in January 2021. One reason for the rift: security concerns.

But there is more that separates Amodei and Altman: Altman is considered an excellent networker and salesman, Amodei is considered an excellent but thoughtful scientist. This became clear when Microsoft became OpenAI's anchor investor in 2019. At the time, Amodei negotiated a security clause into the contract, but Altman gave Microsoft a veto right that overrode it. It was the start of a bitter rivalry.