Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, faces off with David Sacks

AI startup Anthropic is doing everything it can to keep up with bigger competitor OpenAI, which is spending money at a historic pace with support from… Microsoft and Nvidia. More recently, humanity has been facing an equally dangerous adversary: ​​the United States government.

David Sachs, a venture capitalist who works President Donald Trump The AI ​​and cryptocurrency czar has publicly criticized Anthropic for what he called the company’s campaign to support “the left’s vision of AI regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clarke, head of policy for the AI ​​startup, wrote an article article This week, titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” Sachs criticized the company over X.

“Anthropic operates a sophisticated regulatory takeover strategy based on fear mongering,” Sachs said. books Tuesday.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has established itself as a White House partner since the beginning of the second Trump administration. On January 21, the day after the inauguration, Trump announced a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAI, oracle and Softbank To invest billions of dollars in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.

Sacks’s criticisms of Anthropicism strike at the foundation of the company and its original reason for existence. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 and started Anthropy with a task To build safer artificial intelligence. OpenAI started as a nonprofit lab in 2015, but was quickly moving toward commercialization, with heavy funding from Microsoft.

They are now the two most valuable private AI companies in the country, with OpenAI controlling 500 billion dollars Evaluation and capture anthropy to evaluate $183 billion. OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora applications, while Anthropic’s Claude models are particularly popular in the enterprise.

When it comes to regulation, companies have very different views. OpenAI has pushed for fewer guardrails, while Anthropic has bidder Part of the Trump administration’s efforts to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly opposed efforts by the federal government to preempt state-level AI regulation, most notably a Trump-backed provision that would have blocked such rules for 10 years.

This proposal, part of the “Big Beautiful Bill” draft, was eventually abandoned. Anthropic later supported SB 53 in Californiawhich requires transparency and safety disclosure from AI companies, which actually goes in the opposite direction of the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have an important impact on the safety of frontier AI,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post on September 8. “Without them, laboratories with increasingly robust models may face increasing incentives to roll back their safety and disclosure programs in order to compete.”

Anthropic did not provide a comment for this story. Sachs did not respond to a request for comment.

For Sachs, the priority in AI is to innovate as quickly as possible to make sure the United States doesn’t lose out to China.

“The United States is currently in the AI ​​race, and our main global competition is China,” Sachs said in an on-stage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “They are the only other country that has the talent, resources and technological expertise to beat us in AI.”

But Sachs strongly denied that he was trying to eliminate Anthropicism in the process of upgrading American artificial intelligence.

In a post on X On Thursday, Sachs competed for A Bloomberg story Which linked his comments to increased federal scrutiny of Anthropics.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Just two months ago, the White House agreed to offer Anthropic’s Claude app to all branches of government through the GSA App Store.”

Instead, Sachs claimed, Anthropic portrayed itself as political underdogs, positioning its leadership as principled advocates for public safety while pursuing a public campaign that portrayed any response as partisan targeting.

“Anthropic’s government affairs and media strategy has been to consistently position itself as an enemy of the Trump administration,” Sachs said. “But do not complain to the media that you are being targeted, when all we did was express political disagreement.”

Sachs pointed to several examples of what he considered hostile behavior. He noted Dario Amodei’s comparison of Trump to a “feudal warlord” during the 2024 election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ campaign for president.

Sachs also pointed to editorials the company published on key conflicting parts of the Trump administration’s AI policy agenda, including a proposed moratorium on state-level regulation, elements of the Middle East strategy and a chip export strategy. Anthropic has also hired senior officials under Biden to lead its government relations team, Sachs noted.

The AI ​​czar took particular umbrage with Clark’s article and its warnings about the potentially transformative and destabilizing power of AI.

“My own experience is that as these AI systems become smarter and smarter, they develop more complex goals. And when those goals don’t exactly align with our preferences and the right context, the AI ​​systems will behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “The other reason I’m afraid is that I can see a path for these systems to start designing their successors, albeit in a very early form.”

Such “fear-mongering” stifles innovation, Sachs said.

“It is fundamentally responsible for the state’s regulatory frenzy that is destroying the startup ecosystem,” Sachs wrote on X.

Anthropic also moved away from actions taken by many other tech companies explicitly to appease Trump.

Leaders from deadCompanies like OpenAI and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies, attending White House dinners, allocating tens of billions of dollars to US infrastructure projects, and softening their public stances. Amodei was not invited to the recent White House dinner, which included several of the company’s industry leaders He confirmed the information.

However, Anthropic continues to hold major federal contracts, including a A deal worth $200 million With the Department of Defense and access to federal agencies through the General Services Administration. It is too Recently formed created a National Security Advisory Council to align its work with American interests, and began offering a version of his Claude model to government agents in order to $1 per year.

But Sachs isn’t the only influential Republican tech investor to express criticism of the company.

Keith Rabois, whose husband works in the Trump administration, waded into the mix this week.

“If Anthropic actually believes their rhetoric about safety, they can always shut down the company,” Rabois wrote on X. “And apply pressure then.”

He watches: Anthropologist Mike Krieger at the launch of a new model