OpenAI’s Board Approached Anthropic About Merger
OpenAI’s board of directors approached Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of rival large-language model developer Anthropic, about a potential merger of the two companies, said a person with direct knowledge. The approach came after OpenAI’s board had fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday and was part of an effort by OpenAI to persuade Amodei to replace Altman as CEO, the person said.
It’s not clear whether the merger proposal led to any serious discussion. Amodei quickly turned down the CEO offer due to his position at Anthropic. The 2-year-old startup, which sells Claude, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is in fierce competition with OpenAI to recruit researchers and win customers.
THE TAKEAWAY
OpenAI’s board approached Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei about a potential merger of the company, as it tried to persuade Amodei to replace Sam Altman as CEO.
The proposal for a merger is a major turnabout for OpenAI, which until Friday had been the clear leader in a race to develop generative AI products. Amodei is also a former employee of OpenAI who with a group of others left in late 2020 to launch Anthropic over concerns the company was moving too quickly to commercialize its technology.
Amodei has been an outspoken advocate of the need for caution in AI development. At a conference in September, Amodei stressed the need for increased regulation to make sure AI systems can’t be used for nefarious purposes like developing biological weapons. Anthropic has a large team of staff focused on ensuring “alignment,” or making sure the AI reflects human values.
The board’s decision to approach Amodei for the CEO job stands out in light of OpenAI employee disagreements that preceded Altman’s ouster around whether the company was developing its AI safely enough. OpenAI co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever, who fired Altman after the board voted to remove him, had been co-leading a research team working on technical solutions to prevent its AI systems from running rogue.
In addition to Amodei, the board approached other executives to be interim CEO after firing Altman, including GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, The Information earlier reported. Ultimately, on Sunday the board named Emmett Shear, co-founder of streaming site Twitch, as interim CEO.
A merger between OpenAI and Anthropic would be a messy situation for Microsoft, Amazon and Google, who have all used their cloud computing businesses to get closer to one of other of the companies. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI, as well as its exclusive cloud provider. Anthropic signed multi-billion dollar cloud computing deals with Amazon and Google, which both invested in the AI startup.
Anthropic has told some investors it has been generating revenue at a $100 million annualized rate, The Information has previously reported, implying it has generated more than $8 million in revenue per month. Those numbers are expected to grow significantly in the coming months, due to a recent deal with Amazon Web Services, in which AWS will sell Anthropic’s AI software to cloud customers.
By the end of this year, Anthropic projected it would generate revenue at a $200 million annualized pace, implying nearly $17 million in monthly revenue. And by the end of 2024, Anthropic hopes to generate more than $40 million in monthly revenue, a $500 million annualized rate.