Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, faces off with David Sacks

AI startup Anthropic is doing its best to keep up with its larger rival OpenAI, which is spending money at a historic pace on OpenAI’s support. Microsoft And Nvidia. Anthropic has recently been facing an equally frightening foe: the US government.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who served as President Donald Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, has publicly criticized Anthropic for what he calls a campaign to support the company’s “vision of AI regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, head of policy at the AI ​​startup Anthropic, wrote in a letter article In a speech this week titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” Sacks attacked the company against X.

“Anthropic is running a complex strategy of regulatory capture based on fear mongering,” Sacks said wrote on Tuesday.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has established itself as a partner of the White House since the beginning of the second Trump administration. On January 21, the day after the inauguration, Trump announced a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in US artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Sacks’ criticism of Anthropic deals a blow to the company’s foundations and its real raison d’être. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 and joined Anthropic mission To create safer AI. OpenAI started as a non-profit laboratory in 2015, but was rapidly moving towards commercialization with major funding from Microsoft.

They are now the two most valuable private AI companies in the country; OpenAI has a valuation of $500 billion, while Anthropic has a valuation of $183 billion. While OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora applications, Anthropic’s Claude models are especially popular in enterprises.

Companies have very different views when it comes to regulation. While OpenAI lobbies for fewer guardrails, Anthropic opposed It’s part of the Trump administration’s effort to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly pushed back against the federal government’s efforts to block state-level regulations on artificial intelligence, particularly a Trump-backed provision that would block such rules for 10 years.

This proposal, which was part of the draft “Big Beautiful Bill”, was ultimately abandoned. Anthropic later passed California’s SB 53This situation, which would require transparency and security disclosures from artificial intelligence companies, goes in the opposite direction of the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have a significant impact on border AI security,” Anthropic wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post. “Without this, laboratories with increasingly powerful models may face increasing incentives to dial back their own security and disclosure programs in order to compete.”

Antropik had no comment for this story. Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.

According to Sacks, the priority in artificial intelligence is to innovate as quickly as possible to ensure that the US does not lose out to China.

“The United States is now in the AI ​​race, and our primary global competitor is China,” Sacks said in an onstage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. he said. “They are the only country that has the talent, resources and technology expertise to fundamentally beat us on AI.”

But Sacks has adamantly denied trying to take down Anthropic in the process of removing U.S. AI.

In a post on X On Thursday, Sacks issued an objection: Bloomberg’s story This tied his comments to increasing federal scrutiny of Anthropic.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Just a few months ago, the White House approved the rollout of Anthropic’s Claude app to all branches of government through the GSA App Store.”

Instead, Sacks argued, Anthropic portrayed itself as a political underdog, positioned its leadership as principled defenders of public safety and ran a public campaign that framed any pushback as partisan targeting.

“Anthropic’s government affairs and media strategy has been to consistently position itself as an enemy of the Trump administration,” Sacks said. “But don’t whine to the media that you’re being ‘targeted’ when all we’re doing is voicing a policy disagreement.”

Sacks noted several examples of what he viewed as hostile actions. He referenced Dario Amodei’s comparison of Trump to a “feudal warlord” during the 2024 election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Sacks also cited the company’s op-eds opposing key parts of the Trump administration’s AI policy agenda, including the proposed moratorium on state-level regulations and elements of the Middle East and chip export strategy. Sacks noted that Anthropic has also hired senior Biden-era officials to lead its government relations team.

The AI ​​czar was particularly incensed by Clark’s article and his warnings about the potentially transformative and destabilizing power of AI.

“My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop increasingly complex goals. When those goals are not fully aligned with both our preferences and the right context, AI systems will behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “Another reason I’m afraid is that I can see the path to these systems starting to design their successors, albeit very early.”

This kind of “fear mongering” stifles innovation, Sacks said.

“This is primarily responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem,” Sacks wrote to X.

Anthropic also distanced itself from actions many other tech companies have taken openly to appease Trump.

leaders MetaOpenAI and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies by attending White House dinners, committing tens of billions of dollars to US infrastructure projects and softening their public stances. Amodei was not invited to a recent White House dinner attended by many industry leaders. confirmed to The Information.

Still, Anthropic continues to have major federal contracts, including: $200 million deal Access to federal agencies through the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration. At the same time recently formed He established a national security advisory council to align his work with U.S. interests and began offering a version of the Claude model to government clients for $1 a year.

But Sacks isn’t the only influential Republican tech investor to voice criticism of the company.

Keith Rabois, whose husband works in the Trump administration, also joined us this week.

“If Anthropic really believed their rhetoric about security, they could always shut down the company,” Rabois wrote to X. “And then lobby.”

WRISTWATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on the launch of the new model