Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on leaving Sam Altman's OpenAI to start Anthropic: There were a lot of folks inside who didn't…

Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, has revealed the two core convictions that drove him to leave OpenAI and build what is now one of its most formidable rivals—scaling laws and safety. In a candid conversation on investor Nikhil Kamath's podcast WTF Is, Amodei traced his departure back to 2019, when early experiments with GPT-2 began showing him something most of his colleagues weren't ready to accept.

"You find incredible increases in performance," he said, describing what happens when you scale models up with more data and compute. "There were a lot of folks inside and outside who didn't believe it at all."

Amodei joined OpenAI just a few months after it was founded in 2015, eventually leading all of research there. But as GPT-2 and GPT-3 took shape, he and a small group of colleagues began developing a distinct vision—one that OpenAI's leadership wasn't fully buying into.

Amodei saw the scaling laws coming in 2019, and most people at OpenAI didn't

Amodei's first conviction was deceptively simple: make the models bigger, give them more data and more compute, and performance climbs steeply. What he calls the "scaling laws" are now received wisdom in AI—but in 2019, they were a minority view. He and his co-founders pushed the case hard inside OpenAI. Leadership eventually came around, but not completely on their terms.

The second conviction was weightier. If AI systems were going to develop into general cognitive tools—reasoning and problem-solving at the level of the human brain—then how they were built mattered enormously. "The economic implications are gonna be enormous. The geopolitical implications are gonna be enormous," Amodei said. "It's gonna transform how the world works."

He didn't think OpenAI had a serious commitment to AI safety, and that his reason

What pushed him over the edge wasn't disagreement over the destination—it was doubt about the seriousness of the journey. Despite plenty of language at OpenAI about responsible AI development, Amodei said he wasn't convinced the institution had a genuine, deep commitment to getting it right.

Rather than stay and argue, he drew his own line. "Don't argue with someone else's vision," he said. "If you have a strong vision and you share that vision with a few other people, you should just go off and do your own thing."

He did. In 2021, Amodei co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela and several former OpenAI colleagues. The company has since raised billions from Amazon and Google, and its Claude models now compete directly with ChatGPT across enterprise and consumer use cases.