Team Altman vs. Team Amodei

This week at India’s AI Summit in New Delhi, the animosity between two Silicon Valley elites was on full display. Sam Altman, CEO/Co-founder of OpenAI and Dario Amodie, CEO/Co-founder of Anthropic shared the stage with other industry and political luminaries when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked everyone to raise their joined hands in a show of solidarity.

All followed suit, except for Altman and Amodei. In a moment described by one Reddit user as “cringe masterpiece,” instead of holding hands, the two chose to raise an individual closed fist. And they say women are too emotional to lead.

Let’s take a closer look at how these two rivals stack up, starting with their backgrounds.

Sam Altman, the 40yr old CEO of OpenAI dropped out from Stanford, while 42yr old Dario Amodei has a Bachelor of Science degree from Stanford University and MS/PhD from Princeton University.

In 2011, Altman started as a partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) and became its president in 2014. He launched OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others.

In 2019, OpenAI restructured to create OpenAI Global, LLC, a capped-profit subsidiary controlled by the nonprofit. That same year, Altman launched another for-profit company called Tools For Humanity, which promoted the Worldcoin cryptocurrency and an eye-scanning system.

Fun fact: Worldcoin was found to have engaged in shady activities to drive signups. Still, Altman was able to raise $240M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and the King of Crypto scams himself - Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). In 2022, Anthropic also received $500M investment…wait for it…from SBF.

Weekend Quiz: How well do you know Silicon Valley "geniuses"?

Soon after, Altman left YC to focus on his full-time role as the CEO of OpenAI. Public announcement and SEC filings, claiming that he was on the YC board were found to be untrue.

Sam Altman was a founder in Y Combinator's very first batch. He was also its president and CEO from 2014 to 2019. But he was never on YC's board, according to the incubator, despite claiming to be its chairman in SEC filings.

In November 2023, OpenAI’s board of directors abruptly fired Altman in a surprise move. When asked about the reasoning behind this coup, here’s what Open AI co-founder, Ilya Sutskever had to say about Altman in a 52-page memo to independent members of the OpenAI board.

(Sutskever) described Altman as exhibiting “a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.”

In 2024, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging they “abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.”

According to the Washington Post, Altman has a track record of losing the confidence of his leadership team at companies he has led while emerging unscathed thanks to his powerful friends in Silicon Valley.

The OpenAI CEO lost the confidence of top leaders in the three organizations he has directed, yet each time he’s rebounded to greater heights.

In October 2025, OpenAI restructured to a PBC (Public Benefit Corporation) known as OpenAI Group PBC, while the nonprofit became OpenAI Foundation.

Amodei’s record is far less controversial. He was the VP of Research at OpenAI in 2021 when he along with his sister, Daniela and other senior people from OpenAI left to found Anthropic, which also operates as a PBC.

OpenAI is currently valued at $500B while Anthropic is at $380B. Both have raised astronomical levels of funds from investors. According to Pitchbook, the most recent round of financing puts Anthropic slightly ahead of OpenAI with $69.1 billion raised against the latter’s $66.4 billion.

This further intensifies the competitive pressure between the two biggest LLM developers as they race to go public sometime this year.

However, OpenAI is on track to close the gap and then some with its upcoming new round of funding.

OpenAI is close to finalizing the first phase of a new funding round that is likely to bring in more than $100 billion, which could drive the overall valuation of the company over $850 billion. The strategic investors including Amazon.com Inc., SoftBank Group Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

What make these fundraising figures rather astonishing is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have made a profit yet. In addition, the former’s partners have taken on massive debt to fund its operations.

Companies supplying data centers, chips, and “compute” processing power to OpenAI have taken on about $96 billion in debt to fund their operations, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. The news highlights the AI sector’s increasing reliance on debt and its growing dependence on loss-making AI startup OpenAI in particular.

OpenAI has made $1.4 trillion in commitments to procure the energy and computing power it needs to fuel its operations against projected $20 billion in revenues this year.

Altman was visibly annoyed, even mildly threatening investor Brad Gerstner who tried to question him about this massive gap.

Altman:

First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer. I just enough like, you know, people are .. I think there’s a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. I don’t I don’t think you

Gerstner (scrambling to reassure Altman):

including myself, including myself.

Altman:

people who talk with a lot of like breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we we could sell you know your shares or anybody else’s to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter whatever about this very quickly.

We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing that AI that can automate science will create huge value.

So, you know, there are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it’s appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous OpenAI is about to go out of business and, you know, whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock and I would love to see them get burned on that.

After his “How dare you question me?!” opening salvo, Altman reverted to his classic calm demeanor to add some major caveats.

Um, but you know, I we carefully plan, we understand where the technology, where the capability is going to grow, go and and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. we might screw it up like this is the bet that we’re making and we’re taking a risk along with that. A certain risk is if we don’t have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who was also on Gerstner’s podcast chuckled at Altman’s response. Nadella is likely counting on the OpenAI boss’ oratory skills to keep the hard questions at bay. Microsoft stock took a $440B hit back in January signaling investors’ intensifying focus on capital expenditures.

Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI,

The fates of Microsoft and OpenAI are intertwined for now. We’ll dig more into this another time.

When it comes to business strategy, the two rivals have a very different approaches.

OpenAI's top line has been propelled by consumer ChatGPT at massive scale, according to Reuters. In addition, OpenAI said it would start testing ads in ChatGPT, ramping up efforts to generate revenue to fund the high costs of developing the technology.

Where does Anthropic's growth come from?

Businesses contributed to 80% of its revenue. More than 300,000 companies use Anthropic and tap into its different models through the API.

Selling AI applications beyond model access also helps lift earnings. Claude Code, launched earlier this year, has sprinted to nearly a $1 billion run rate.

Amodei, who is known for his directness, has emphasized the extreme financial risk of misjudging the timing of AI’s exponential growth and responded to the massive boost in capital expenditures by hyperscalers and rivals.

Without naming names, Amodei criticized rivals for “YOLOing” on spending, failing to fully comprehend the risks, and “just doing stuff because it sounds cool.”

He also pointed out that Anthropic’s AI is geared toward enterprise customers rather than fickle consumers, allowing them to rely more on revenue. Overall, Anthropic’s spending on computing capacity is still substantial.

That said, investors are increasingly critical of what they describe as “circular” deals involving the industry’s biggest players.

OpenAI has stayed in favor with the current U.S. administration through direct and indirect financial contributions. In January 2025, President Trump announced a private-sector $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure.

Trump said that ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle are planning a joint venture called Stargate, which he said will build data centers and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison joined Trump at the White House for the launch.

In September 2025, an OpenAI executive became the top Trump donor with a $25 million gift.

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave Trump’s super PAC a whopping $25 million - the largest of the six-month fundraising cycle.

The gigantic donation is a sign of Brockman’s political allegiances, and of the ChatGPT-maker’s attempt to curry favor with the Republican administration.

Anthropic has also made similar strategic infrastructure investment commitments to compete with OpenAI.

Anthropic is launching a $50 billion nationwide artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out, starting with custom data centers in Texas and New York.

The project, developed with GPU cloud partner Fluidstack, will create 800 permanent jobs and more than 2,000 construction roles, with the first sites going live in 2026.

Recently, Anthropic has found itself in the U.S. Government’s crosshairs. The company doesn’t want its AI used in autonomous weapons or government surveillance. This ethical stance (unless abandoned) may cost Anthropic a major military contract and also potentially put a proverbial target on its back.

The Pentagon is reconsidering its relationship with the company, including a $200 million contract, ostensibly because the safety-conscious AI firm objects to participating in certain deadly operations.

The so-called Department of War might even designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” a scarlet letter usually reserved for companies that do business with countries scrutinized by federal agencies, like China, which means the Pentagon would not do business with firms using Anthropic’s AI in their defense work.

We will continue to dive deeper into the future of AI as these CEOs bump up against the financial and technological limitations of hyperscale computing, while trying to keep their investors and customers from bailing, in this rapidly shapeshifting geo-political landscape.