Last Thanksgiving, Brian Israel found himself being asked the same question again and again.
The general counsel at the AI lab Anthropic had been watching dumbfounded along with the rest of the tech world as, just two miles south of Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, its main competitor OpenAI seemed to be imploding.
OpenAI’s board had fired CEO Sam Altman, saying he had lost their confidence, in a move that seemed likely to tank the startup’s $80 billion-plus valuation. The firing was only possible thanks to OpenAI’s strange corporate structure, in which its directors have no fiduciary duty to increase profits for shareholders—a structure Altman himself had helped design so that OpenAI could build powerful AI insulated from perverse market incentives. To Israel and almost everyone else, it appeared that plan had badly backfired. Five days later, after a pressure campaign from OpenAI’s main investor Microsoft, venture capitalists, and OpenAI’s own staff—who held valuable equity in the company—Altman was reinstated as CEO, and two of the three directors who fired him resigned. “AI belongs to the capitalists now,” the New York Times concluded, as OpenAI began to build a new board that seemed more befitting of a high-growth company than a research lab concerned about the dangers of powerful AI.
And so Israel found himself being frantically asked by Anthropic’s investors and clients that weekend: Could the same thing happen at Anthropic?
Anthropic, which like OpenAI is a top AI lab, has an unorthodox corporate structure too. The company similarly structured itself in order to ensure it could develop AI without needing to cut corners in pursuit of profits. But that’s pretty much where the likeness ends. To everybody with questions on Thanksgiving, Israel’s answer was the same: what happened at OpenAI can’t happen to us.
Read More: Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy
Prior to the OpenAI…
