Anthropic was supposed to be a ‘safe’ alternative to OpenAI, but CEO Dario Amodei admits his company struggles to balance safety with profits

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei defected from OpenAI partly because he thought it wasn’t focusing enough on safety, but now his own company is fighting to balance its founding mission with commercial pressure.

In an interview with podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, Dario Amodei emphasized that Anthropic faces the same pressure as its competitors to keep innovating and ultimately become profitable 

“We’re under an incredible amount of commercial pressure and make it even harder for ourselves because we have all this safety stuff we do that I think we do more than other companies,” he said on the Dwarkesh Podcast.

Amodei was previously a vice president of research focusing on safety at OpenAI before jumping ship to start Anthropic with other ex-employees, like his sister and cofounder Daniela Amodei, who thought OpenAI was not focusing enough on safety. At Anthropic, Amodei has led the effort to build its large language model, Claude, with safety in mind. The company has done this in part through its Constitutional AI approach, which, rather than promote rules, gives Claude values so it can learn to be “a good AI.” Anthropic has also said it would not release any AI capable of ca...