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Anthropic’s Crisis of Conscience

Dario Amodei’s multi-hundred-billion-dollar A.I. unicorn has always billed itself as the “safety first” lab among the major hyperscalers. But now that obligations and commercial pressures have accumulated, the company has reached an inflection point—and is having to take a hard look at its founding principles.

Dario Amodei
Once upon a time, just months after OpenAI was founded, Dario Amodei joined the company to lead its research efforts. He spent a few years there, and alongside several other OpenAI employees, as he recalled on a recent podcast, gradually developed a “vision for how we wanted to make A.I. and what we wanted the company to stand for”—one that didn’t match up with OpenAI’s way of doing things. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
February 26, 2026

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India’s recent A.I. summit garnered a fair bit of attention for a number of viral moments—particularly Sam Altman’s dire assertion that “the world is not prepared” for what’s coming. But my favorite was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s request for industry leaders to stand for a photo op while holding hands as a demonstration of technological and societal unity. Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai seemed glad to do so, but Altman was standing right next to his former colleague and nemesis Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic. After some awkward confusion, the two men held up clenched fists instead—a fitting, if somewhat ominous, metaphor for their dynamic.