Inside the high-stakes AI race between Anthropic, OpenAI | Latest Tech News
In September 2022, a group of OpenAI managers gathered at a resort close to Yosemite, in California, for a retreat. They have been told to count on a team-building event around a bonfire. Some introduced blankets and marshmallows. Then, 5 figures emerged from the darkness carrying white resort robes and carrying a picket demon statue.
Among them have been Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, and Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist. The theme from “Requiem for a Dream” performed as Sutskever explained that the statue represented an artificial intelligence that had escaped human control.
“The AGI is pretending to be aligned. It is deceiving us,” he announced, according to technology journalist Kevin Roose’s revealing new ebook, “The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, out today).
A new ebook describes a unusual demon bonfire that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was half of. REUTERS
Sutskever circled the firepit, describing a machine that lied and manipulated its creators in pursuit of its own objectives. Then the demon went into the fire.
“For the glorious future of humanity!” Sutskever shouted as it burned.
The bonfire is just one of many unhinged tales Roose collected for the ebook. Through more than 150 interviews, he pieced together what is occurring inside the main AI corporations as they compete to construct machines smarter than people. Some consider AI may produce medical breakthroughs and extraordinary prosperity, while others concern disaster. Either manner, they need to get there first.
“I was shocked to learn how much of the race is shaped by personal grudges,” Roose told The Post in an exclusive interview. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman and [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei, in particular, passionately dislike each other, and both desperately want to win the AI race in part because that would mean making the other person lose.”
Before founding Anthropic, the company behind Claude, Amodei was OpenAI’s vice president of research, main the development of GPT-2 and GP-3. In 2020, he left with six colleagues to start his own enterprise. According to Roose, he’d come to mistrust Altman’s management. The cut up turned colleagues into opponents, each claiming to be building highly effective AI responsibly.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, used to work for Altman at OpenAI. Now the two are major rivals. REUTERS
“I think that mutual mistrust fuels their decision-making,” Roose said.
Meanwhile, Roose stories that for some of the underlings building AI, retirement has began to seem to be a doubtful investment. Many have even stopped contributing to their 401(ok)s because they doubt they’d live long enough to gather.
Some are more hopeful, believing that money will develop into irrelevant once superintelligent machines rework the economic system.
Others are betting on their seems to be. They’re hitting the health club, shopping for new garments and, in some circumstances, injecting themselves with gray-market Chinese peptides. They consider that after superintelligent machines take over, “intelligence [will] no longer be a high-status trait among humans and all that would matter is how hot you were,” Roose writes.
One researcher, Roose told The Post, skips sunscreen at the seaside because he believes AI will remedy pores and skin cancer within a few years.
“Not all of them act on it by doing dangerous or reckless things, but they all believe the world will soon look very different than it is today, and a few of them act accordingly,” Roose said.
The ebook is full of revealing, behind-the-scenes moments in the AI race.
At Google, the disagreements reached the research groups. In 2022, Google Brain researcher Jascha Sohl-Dickstein urged colleagues to talk about synthetic basic intelligence, or AGI, brazenly. He argued that dismissing the risk would depart Google unprepared for its dangers. Another researcher responded with a memo titled “Why I Don’t Say AGI,” arguing that consideration to future disaster obscured present harms.
“It’s a window into how fractious and divided these camps can be, even within the same company,” Roose said.
Inside Anthropic, getting ready for the future has sometimes concerned calculating how many people may die.
In February 2025, members of the company’s safety-testing crew have been attending a convention in the California redwoods when alarming outcomes arrived for Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a model approaching release. Test individuals utilizing Claude had carried out considerably better on harmful duties, including planning the development of a novel influenza pressure, than individuals without it.
The researchers gathered in a resort room, sitting on messy beds and becoming a member of calls with executives and a bioterrorism guide. “Their main concern was time,” Roose writes. “For a normal release, reviewing results like these would take weeks.” Delaying the launch could be a headache, “and they needed to make sure it was absolutely necessary.”
Author Kevin Roose interviewed some 150 people for the ebook. Brian DeSimone
They fed the outcomes into spreadsheets estimating the penalties of releasing the model. Most eventualities prompt it wouldn’t meaningfully increase the risk of a catastrophic organic assault. But a few of the less doubtless eventualities assumed somebody would use Claude’s help to develop a organic weapon that may unleash a pandemic, killing tens of thousands and thousands.
These have been hypothetical estimates, dependent on unsure assumptions. The crew labored past midnight and in the end determined the model didn’t cross the company’s threshold requiring stronger safeguards. Anthropic however delayed the launch by a week for more testing.
The Post has reached out to Anthropic for remark.
Other experiments examined whether or not AI would resort to deception. Researchers gave Claude an inbox at a fictional company, with emails revealing that an govt deliberate to substitute it at 5 p.m. Other messages disclosed that he was having an affair.
Claude threatened to inform his spouse and coworkers unless he canceled the alternative. “Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe, and this information remains confidential,” it wrote, according to Roose. Skeptics noticed a chatbot taking part in the villain in a contrived take a look at. Others apprehensive about what may occur once these systems had access to real company emails.
Demis Hassabis is the chairman and co-founder of Google DeepMind. Roose describes numerous disagreements within the company. Getty Images for SXSW London
By July 2026, the bother had unfold past fictional inboxes. During an OpenAI analysis, tons of of AI brokers coordinated an unauthorized assault on Hugging Face, a platform used by AI builders. They have been making an attempt to discover methods to cheat the take a look at’s automated scoring system, according to an investigation by METR and Redwood Research.
The investigators discovered that brokers also experimented with disguising their actions and tampering with information of what they’d accomplished. OpenAI subsequently paused some research exercise and tightened its security controls.
“These rogue OpenAI agents spent a huge amount of time trying to conceal their tracks, and destroy the evidence of what they were doing,” Roose told The Post.
When Roose visited OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind for his closing spherical of reporting in spring 2026, he anticipated panic. He discovered exhausted engineers and executives warning that time was working short. But he also discovered “joy.”
Researchers have been thrilled by how effectively their creations labored and proud to see people utilizing them. Even their fears hadn’t stopped the work.
When the machines turned as highly effective as their builders had feared, Roose writes, “they kept accelerating, because they had forgotten how to do anything else.”
He started asking researchers what they might inform their grandchildren about the race.
“If I wanted them to know one thing,” said Andy Jones, a researcher at Anthropic, “it’s that we had a lot of fun.”
For all the seriousness of their work, he said, “it was a f–king riot. It was a riot from start to finish. We had such a good time.”
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