Anthropic, meanwhile, has said that it is preparing for a future with increasingly powerful AI systems that could eventually match or exceed human experts across many fields. For the past few years, the race between OpenAI and Anthropic has been about one big idea: building AI systems that can do far more than answer questions, write code or generate images. OpenAI has openly described its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 with a mission centred on advanced AI. In 2026, it continues to describe AGI as central to its mission. In 2023, the Claude-maker introduced its Responsible Scaling Policy, designed to address catastrophic risks from increasingly powerful AI systems.
Its current public policy agenda says advanced AI can create risks involving cybersecurity, chemical and biological threats and other areas, while also arguing that AI could bring major economic and social benefits. This month, the ChatGPT-maker said its upcoming Astra model had reached its “Critical” threshold for cybersecurity capability. OpenAI said that, with the right tools and access, Astra could find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across well-protected systems without a person guiding every step. The company said this required stronger safeguards before deployment. The company says its mission is to help the world safely transition through transformative AI. Its Claude Constitution says Anthropic believes AI could be one of the most world-changing and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, while also arguing that a safety-focused company should remain at the frontier if powerful AI is coming anyway. It created different safety levels and said stronger safeguards would be required as models crossed specific capability thresholds.
The two AI labs are still building increasingly capable systems. But their leaders are also warning that AI development may be moving so quickly that safety measures could struggle to keep up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed that frontier AI development needs to be paced and that stronger safety measures are necessary. That creates a striking shift in the AI race. The same companies that spent years trying to make machines more capable are now spending more time asking what happens when those machines become capable enough to act with much greater independence. Its stated goal was to develop artificial intelligence in a way that would benefit humanity. The company’s later charter defined AGI as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. OpenAI has not abandoned that goal. Anthropic, on the other hand, was created with a different emphasis. That safety focus has produced formal rules around how Anthropic develops increasingly capable models.
Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow the pace of AI development.