Inside the OpenAI–Anthropic feud: Amodei's exit and the rivalry that followed
A retrospective by Chinese outlet Gelonghui (republished by 36Kr) recounts the December 2020 OpenAI all-hands where the screen went black and Dario Amodei left with six core members, an episode internally dubbed "The Divorce," tracing the rift to the 2017 "Countries" AGI-consortium idea, an unwritten promise tied to Microsoft's $1B investment, and OpenAI's refusal to give Amodei's safety team veto power over model releases. It says Anthropic was founded in 2021 with plans for only 50 staff and cites 2026 rivalry figures: a $65B round in May at a $965B post-money valuation versus OpenAI's $852B, Anthropic at $65B annualized revenue by late July against OpenAI's just over $40B, and Menlo Ventures data showing Anthropic ahead on enterprise LLM spend 40% to 27%, with Claude Code at roughly 54% of the coding segment. It also says that on Oct 7 OpenAI pushed GPT-6 to all ChatGPT users (paid tier GPT-6 Sol, free tier GPT-6 Luna) while Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens, about 75% cheaper than the prior generation.
It matters less as new information than as a popular account of how a safety dispute and an unfulfilled deal shaped today's two leading labs.