Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Anthropic, as I said in the piece, kind of radiates the personality of a Swiss bank.

There's not much to look at.

They took over a turnkey lease from the messaging company Slack about 18 months ago.

It seems like they removed anything interesting to look at.

So there's very little to describe from the inside of the company.

And I was kind of whisked right away to one of the two floors where they allow outside visitors and had very gracious and gentle and firm PR minders for my time while I was there.

Well, this was not the first time that one group of people decided that another group of people was not to be entrusted with the development of what will potentially be the most powerful technology ever developed if it comes to fruition.

The original story of the founding of OpenAI also was that Elon Musk and Sam Altman didn't trust Dennis Hassabis at DeepMind and Google to be pursuing this responsibly.

And one of the things about the development of this technology is that it touches on so many different motivations in people, that a lot of it is scientific curiosity is what's driving the development of this.

And that OpenAI was originally in a position to recruit talent from places like Google because they said,

We are going to develop this for the benefit of humanity at large, and we are going to do this with an intrepid scientific spirit, and we're going to be careful, and we're going to be responsible.

But then the problem is that this is kind of a glittering object that offers potentially great power to the people who develop it.

And so the seven people who defected from OpenAI felt as though OpenAI had either been disingenuous in the first place with the articulation of their mission or had allowed for some mission drift in what they were doing.

And they thought, now we really can't trust Sam Altman to be doing this, so we need to be doing it safely.

Well, I mean, I get the feeling that at Anthropic, everybody really does trust each other.

It feels like a very mission-aligned place.

Yeah.

at least the people that I talk to seem to be people of great property and integrity about these things.

So it wasn't so much that there was conflict within the company.

The fears are, how do you compete in a marketplace where your competitors might not be driven by the same values?