OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Thursday subtly criticized rival Anthropic Inc., saying he thinks it’s “bad for society” when companies start abandoning their commitment to democratic processes because “some people don’t like the people in charge right now.”
“Government is considered more powerful than private business,” Altman said at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media and Telecom conference.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei criticized Altman’s ties to the Trump administration in a memo to employees on Friday, the Information reported. Amodei wrote that while Altman “praises Trump like a dictator,” Antropic doesn’t “praise Trump like a dictator.”
The Pentagon has been at loggerheads with Anthropic in recent weeks over how the agency can use artificial intelligence models. Negotiations escalated, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declaring in a post on X on Friday that Anthropic was a “supply chain risk to national security.”
President Donald Trump also directed all federal agencies in the United States to “immediately cease” all use of Anthropic’s technology.
Hours later, Altman announced that OpenAI had signed its own agreement with the Department of Defense. The company faced criticism for announcing the acquisition so soon after Anthropic was blacklisted, and Altman acknowledged that it “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”
He said Thursday that the company’s intention was to de-escalate the situation.
“The situation is complicated. We are busy with other things,” Altman said. “But since things started colliding last week, it has become increasingly clear that things could go very wrong.”
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research institute and exploded into the mainstream in 2022 with the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT. Since then, the company has grown to become one of the fastest-growing commercial companies on the planet, announcing a $110 billion funding round last week at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion.
The startup announced Thursday that its latest model, GPT‑5.4, will be released within ChatGPT, an application programming interface and coding tool Codex. According to an OpenAI release, this model is the most “functional and efficient” for professional work.
As of February, ChatGPT supported over 900 million weekly active users, up from 800 million in October. However, the company has google They are competing to gain more users and market share.
OpenAI’s annual revenue run rate (ARR) recently exceeded $25 billion, while Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate (ARR) exceeded $19 billion, said a person familiar with the companies’ finances, who requested anonymity because the details are confidential.
–CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report
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