The origin story of Anthropic just got a rewrite. Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder and CEO, has publicly stated that his departure from OpenAI was driven primarily by a breakdown of trust in Sam Altman, rather than the AI safety disagreements that have long served as the official narrative.
The admission, made during a recent podcast interview, adds a deeply personal dimension to what is arguably the most consequential corporate rivalry in artificial intelligence.
From colleague to competitor
Amodei joined OpenAI in 2015, not long after the nonprofit research lab was founded. He rose through the ranks to become vice president of research, a role that put him at the center of the organization’s most important technical decisions.
By late 2020, he was out. His departure was announced on December 29, 2020, and within weeks he and his sister Daniela Amodei had begun building Anthropic, which they founded in 2021 with an explicit focus on safety-oriented AI development.
