Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson

Anthropic was able to raise huge amounts of money almost immediately from the usual passel of rich AI-safety patrons, including Jaan Tallinn and Dustin Moskovitz, the billionaire cofounder of Facebook who was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard University. Money in Silicon Valley often circulates between small groups of elite networks, including those with long-standing rivalries. Moskovitz’s charity vehicle Open Philanthropy had put $30 million into OpenAI, and Altman had financially backed Moskovitz’s own software Asana; however, Moskovitz wanted to back OpenAI’s new competitor too. (Tallinn would later say he regretted helping stoke so much competition in AI, making it potentially more dangerous.) Within a year Anthropic had raised another $580 million, mostly from the wealthy young founders of the crypto exchange FTX, who found their way to Amodei thanks to their shared interests in effective altruism. Ironically, two years after Amodei had complained about OpenAI’s commercial ties with Microsoft, he would take more than $6 billion in investment from Google and Amazon, aligning himself with both companies. It turned out that in this new world where building AGI required near bottomless resources, people didn’t say no to the tech conglomerates.