Anthropic is taking off the gloves and ramping up its war with bitter rival OpenAI.
On Thursday, the Claude chatbot maker announced it was pouring $20 million into a new super PAC formed to oppose the super PACs backed by OpenAI figures, The New York Times reports.
With the donation, the dueling companies are poised to fight over shaping the future of the industry’s regulation by backing favored candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Anthropic, generally speaking, is in favor of stronger guardrails, while OpenAI opposes stricter regulation.
“The AI policy decisions we make in the next few years will touch nearly every part of public life,” Anthropic wrote in the announcement. “We don’t want to sit on the sidelines while these policies are developed.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 with a focus on safety. It was formed from a splinter group of former OpenAI employees, including Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who left the company because of differences over its direction after the then-nonprofit accepted $1 billion in funding from Microsoft.
The super PAC Anthropic is now pouring money into, Public First Action, was formed along similar lines, with the ostensible bipartisan mission of preventing political power from being concentrated in OpenAI. Per the NYT, it will operate as a “dark money” nonprofit, which allows it to air political ads without disclosing its donors. One candidate it will be supporting is Senator Marsha Blackburn (TN-R), a vocal AI critic who’s running for state governor.
The Anthropic-backed group is going up against Leading the Future, an anti-regulation super PAC backed by OpenAI leaders and investors, including Andreessen Horowitz. It has reportedly raised over $100 million, though it’s only publicly disclosed half that amount.
It’s a bold and risky escalation by Anthropic that could land it in the crosshairs of powerful enemies. As the reporting notes, OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration, with the company’s president being a top donor to the one in the Oval Office. OpenAI is pro-deregulation, and so is Trump. Anthropic and Amodei, by contrast, have been blasted by figures in the administration for opposing Trump’s proposed suspension on states passing their own AI laws, earning accusations of “fear-mongering.”
Anthropic’s announcement parted with what could be interpreted as a thinly-veiled dig at OpenAI, which converted itself into a for-profit corporation despite being originally formed as an altruist nonprofit.
“The companies building AI have a responsibility to help ensure the technology serves the public good, not just their own interests,” it read.
More on AI: OpenAI Fires Top Safety Exec Who Opposed ChatGPT’s “Adult Mode”