The rivalry reshaping the artificial intelligence industry began not in corporate boardrooms but in a San Francisco group house on Delano Avenue, where Dario Amodei lived with his sister Daniela and her fiance Holden Karnofsky in 2016.
The Wall Street Journal has traced the roots of the OpenAI-Anthropic split to a single conversation in that house, as "Hvylya" noted. Greg Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder who came from the world of Silicon Valley startups, argued that AI's makers "needed to inform all 300 million Americans about what was coming." Amodei and Karnofsky pushed back, suggesting it might be wiser to brief the government first rather than broadcast bullish AI predictions to the public.
Years later, even as Amodei became one of the loudest public voices warning about AI's dangers, Brockman still saw that early disagreement as proof of a fundamental divide. Daniela Amodei had married Karnofsky, who later joined the OpenAI board - weaving the personal and professional ties even tighter before the eventual rupture.
Karnofsky was the founder of a philanthropy promoting effective altruism - a movement that was among the first communities to take both the potential and the danger of AI seriously. Within four years, Dario, Daniela and nearly a dozen employees would leave OpenAI to found Anthropic. Brockman had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Dario for OpenAI's founding team back in 2015.
"Hvylya" previously reported on how OpenAI's chief scientist warned that AI creates an unprecedented concentration of power.