View / Anthropic’s Amodei grows up on the job

When Dario Amodei and a group of OpenAI employees left to create Anthropic, Amodei filled the “wise professor” role, openly discussing his thoughts on Slack (and trusting employees to keep what he said confidential.)

That openness remained, even as Anthropic transitioned from a small research group to a massive company raising tens of billions of dollars from a wide range of profit-hungry investors.

Today, Anthropic is so big, so powerful, that every word uttered by its CEO is a potential news story. That’s especially true now that the company is locked in a war of wills with the US military over the use of its AI models.

For a moment, Anthropic looked like it had the upper hand. Its stand against the use of AI for surveillance had ginned up an outpouring of support from fans, who wrote messages of encouragement in chalk outside its corporate headquarters. The White House was working on a way to de-escalate the situation, according to people involved in the discussions, so that the military could keep using the technology it needs and Anthropic could keep growing, developing critical national security tools.

But on Wednesday, that all changed. The Information obtained a leaked memo that Amodei wrote, railing against rival OpenAI and calling Trump a petty dictator. The administration was furious, according to people familiar, and the memo egged them on to follow through with threats to designate the company a supply chain risk, which could be devastating for the company’s bottom line.

“If their model has this policy bias based on their constitution, their culture, their people, and so on, I don’t want Lockheed Martin using their model to design weapons for me,” Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said on the All In podcast Friday. “Boeing wants to use Anthropic to build commercial jets — have at it. Boeing wants to use it to build fighter jets — I can’t have that because I don’t trust what the outputs may be because they’re so wedded to their own policy preferences.”

While Anthropic will have a good shot of taking on the Pentagon in court, there was little need for Amodei to pour fuel on the fire with a memo that would no doubt leak. Everyone at the company already knew how he felt from his public protest. On Thursday, in an attempt to placate the White House, Amodei apologized, saying it didn’t reflect his “careful or considered views.”

The thing is, Amodei is a fast learner. He’s adapted quickly to the reality that he’s no longer running a research organization. The board would be shortsighted to replace Amodei with a professional manager — especially if he comes out of this mess a more mature and calculating CEO. The trick is whether Anthropic can hold onto its soul in the process.