Amodei wanted Thiel’s money out of OpenAI
It co-led a $30 billion funding round that valued the company at $380 billion, and reportedly put in about $1.25 billion of its own.
The trigger was the $1.25 million Thiel gave to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, a move Amodei said made him “morally worthy of condemnation. ” At the time, Amodei was a few months into his job at OpenAI, where he led the safety team. He posted the remarks on the company’s internal messaging app, according to a report by The New York Times. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once wanted OpenAI to stop taking money from billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Thiel’s money found its way to Amodei anyway, a decade later. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm Thiel co-founded, made its first direct investment in Anthropic in February this year. The firm is an OpenAI investor too, which gives it a stake in both rival labs.
Three days after Trump won the US presidential election in November 2016, Amodei posted on OpenAI’s internal chat that he feared the country was drifting toward authoritarianism. When the lab was set up as a nonprofit in December 2015, Thiel was among the donors named alongside Elon Musk, Sam Altman , Reid Hoffman and Amazon Web Services. Together they pledged $1 billion. Altman pushed back publicly in October 2016. In 2017, he connected OpenAI with the philanthropy run by Holden Karnofsky, where he was a technical adviser. That organisation, now called Coefficient Giving, donated $30 million to OpenAI, and Karnofsky joined its board. In December 2020, the Amodeis and several colleagues quit, and Anthropic was founded four weeks later.
He also said he was uneasy doing research on militarily powerful technology in such a country, the NYT reported, citing the messages.
“YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee,” he wrote on Twitter, now X. Amodei repeatedly told Altman he would leave if president Greg Brockman wasn’t kept away from the work. That concern has since run through his clashes with the Pentagon over military uses of AI. He was also tied to OpenAI from day one. Thiel was a part-time partner at Y Combinator at the time, and some people called for the accelerator to drop him. Weeks later, Amodei was making the opposite case inside OpenAI. Amodei didn’t just want certain money out. He also helped bring other money in. Karnofsky married Amodei’s sister Daniela later that year. The breaking point came over GPT, the project the siblings had taken over. Altman refused.