Amodei Is Going To War
When it comes to AI Sam Altman takes just about all the airtime, but Dario Amodei is giving him a run for his money, except with a dash less moderation. Amodei started Anthropic in 2021 after he broke away from OpenAI and cofounded the company with his sister Daniela Amodei.
Their AI platform Claude has quickly become synonymous with coding and development. Two of my developer friends have gone from being high-level coders to describing their job as little more than Claude babysitters. “On the best days it feels kinda like now I drive a tractor where my job used to be picking wheat. On the worst days, it’s like babysitting a crying child where my job used to be sitting in peace doing crosswords” I’m told glibly. My other friend was told that he should be maxing out usage, and that his boss was eager for them to be buying a bigger package to support more use.
It’s this ravenous desire for the product that has skyrocketed the company to a $380 billion valuation.
People have deduced that Amazon and Google own the biggest slices of Anthropic. But it isn’t all roses at the company despite its lucrative B2B market dominance.
Amodei made the grave mistake of having some sort of moral backbone and pushed back against the Department of War’s request to remove certain usage guardrails which may enable fully autonomous weapons as well as deleting a line in their Terms of service about “analysis of bulk acquired data” related to domestic mass surveillance. The memo is a long one establishing their position but the media picked up the tail end of it where he gets a bit spicy talking about the motives of Trump and Altman getting his ducks in a row.
In a statement to the NY Post an anonymous Anthropic shareholder vented their concerns, and probably went and hurt their share prices a little more in the process.
“The one thing that was striking to me is the aggressiveness of his opinions on Trump and the Pentagon – given that they were the only ones whose tech was being used in things at the Pentagon.”
He added. “You are a f**king CEO who has raised billions of dollars. You can’t just rant and expect all shareholders to have the same mentality that you have”.
Sticking your neck out is a fraught activity as a CEO. But then again, what is leadership if not standing out from the crowd.