alt Hacker NewsI think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
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> Choosing Grok would be bad for the US
They chose Grok and OpenAI. The story was drowned out by the Anthropic controversy, but an xAI deal was signed the same week.
The mistake here is thinking they can take on Power without really sitting in any officual position of Power.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power. If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
Lyft was briefly number one ahead of Uber, too
There is also:
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
They still need a lot of money and what their VC’s think is going to be more important than what Amedei does. Nothing more profitable than war and government.
App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.
> Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic
if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.