keachhagey

Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown has proven to be an invaluable diplomat for the company, with both the White House and onetime business rivals like Elon Musk.

He was key to ending the Mythos standoff this summer, helping land Dario land his first length 1:1 with the president last month and landing the compute deal with SpaceX that helped ease Claude’s compute crunch.

In our profile, @AmrithRamkumar and I look at how this formerly “awkward kid” who once offered to mop floors at OpenAI is now leveraging his friendly ties with Republicans – of which he is one – to help the company build bridges ahead of its IPO.

wsj.com/tech/ai/tom-br… via @WSJ

New: In a letter to OpenAI board members on Wednesday, three recently fired employees say the company and its competitors should not move forward with work that would decrease AI monitorability.

They also claim their firings are "chilling those who remain at OpenAI."

Updated with details about which employees OpenAI has parted ways with for allegedly mishandling confidential company information: Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni.

Korbak served as the technical contact for Redwood Research and METR in their investigation of the Hugging Face incident.

Rolling scoopage with @berber_jin1 + @ZeffMax
wsj.com/tech/ai/openai… via @WSJ

Over the last few weeks, so many people have asked me: if people at Anthropic believe that AI has a meaningful chance of killing us all, why are they building it? @berber_jin1 and I did a deep dive into Anthropic’s relationship with effective altruism to try to explain how doomerism came to be so influential at the company.

The tale took us to a group house in San Francisco, “clothing optional” swims in the Bahamas and a co-working space in Berkeley funded by an Anthropic investor’s money that has become a central gathering place for those most worried about the existential risk from AI.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-saf… via @WSJ

The internet has been so scrubbed of references to Dario Amodei’s wife, Cami Clark, that if you Google her, you get a picture of his sister instead. Not even Claude can say if he’s married.

But she has been an influential force in his career, introducing him to Eric Schmidt, one of Anthropic’s first investors, with whom she had previously been in a three-year relationship, and serving as a key sounding board and networker.

To get to this point, she overcame much: dropping out of college, a brief early marriage when she was 20 to a man more than 40 years her senior, a bankruptcy and an entrepreneurial path that included trying to get Jeffrey Epstein to invest in her “revolutionary porn company.”
w/ @LukeJKummer

Nvidia is investing in former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s secretive artificial-intelligence lab wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia… via @WSJ

Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines, has released its first AI model – and it’s open weights.

It's a bid to contribute to a decentralized AI ecosystem to counter the frontier labs, whose models Thinking Machines has compared to "central planning."

w/ @berber_jin1

wsj.com/tech/ai/mira-m… via @WSJ

[Updated for precision]: For more than a year, an arbitrator—at Meta's request—has barred former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams from talking about her scathing memoir of her time at the company, even as “Careless People” became a #1 NYT bestseller and sold more than 130K copies in the US. Now she’s suing the company to try to end its efforts to silence her. w/ @MeghanBobrowsky wsj.com/us-news/law/me… via @WSJ

Fun chatting with @MattBelloni about Amazon’s second thoughts on its Sam Altman movie open.spotify.com/episode/0RLB1T…

A wide-ranging subpoena from New York's attorney general asks OpenAI for documents related to everything from advertising to minors to sycophancy.

Exclusive w/ @georgia_wells: A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI wsj.com/tech/openai-in… via @WSJ

OpenAI is weighing drastic price cuts in anticipation that Anthropic will do the same. Scoop w/ @berber_jin1

wsj.com/tech/ai/openai… via @WSJ

Greg Brockman has spent his career in the shadow more famous co-founders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Patrick Collison. Now he’s stepping into the spotlight as the face of the company’s new focus on the eve of its IPO. w/ @laura_nelson

wsj.com/tech/openai-wh… via @WSJ

Welp, that didn't take long. With Elon's lawsuit now in the rearview mirror, OpenAI plans to file for an IPO as soon as Friday.

Killer scoop from my colleagues @cdriebusch @AAndriotis and @berber_jin1

wsj.com/tech/ai/openai… via @WSJ

On the eve of trial, Elon Musk reached out to Greg Brockman about a potential settlement, according to court documents filed by OpenAI last night. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Musk replied:

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.”

The latest on the trial from @AngelAuYeung and Becky Peterson

wsj.com/tech/ai/whats-…

Anthropic’s new Mythos model is proving to be a very useful tool for thawing its frosty relationship with the Trump Administration.

Dario is headed to the West Wing today. w/ @AmrithRamkumar

wsj.com/tech/ai/anthro… via @WSJ

It’s never been entirely clear why Dario and the other Anthropic co-founders left OpenAI. I set out to find out.

“There is no chance. There’s no partnership that can be had.”

A look at Emil Michael, the Uber veteran leading the Trump administration's fight against Anthropic, w/ @heathersomervil @AmrithRamkumar

wsj.com/politics/natio… via @WSJ

As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tried to make his case about the risks of AI-controlled autonomous weapons, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut him off midsentence. "No CEO is going to tell our war fighters what they can and cannot do."

How the fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon spiraled out of control. w/ @AmrithRamkumar @MarcusReports

wsj.com/tech/ai/anthro… via @WSJ

Exclusive: OpenAI’s Sam Altman told staff last night that the company is going to try to work with the Pentagon in classified settings, with the same guardrails Anthropic was asking for -- but maintained technically, not contractually. Developing...

wsj.com/tech/ai/openai… via @WSJ