Sam Altman, mid-fight with Elon Musk, is stirring the pot with Anthropic too

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, finds himself at the center of escalating tensions, not only with Elon Musk but now with Anthropic as well. On Thursday, Anthropic shared a thought-provoking video on its Claude X account, featuring a montage of images accompanied by voiceovers that posed challenging questions about artificial intelligence. Questions such as "Can AI be trusted?" and "What does it mean to work if AI takes most jobs?" were presented, highlighting the company's new initiative, "Inviting hard questions." The initiative aims to address the public's most urgent concerns regarding AI, with Anthropic committing to transparently report on the actions it is taking to tackle these issues. In response to the video, Altman expressed skepticism. He reposted the video with a comment, "I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something," indicating his disbelief at the sincerity of the initiative. Altman’s remarks also hinted at Anthropic's challenges with its frontier model, Fable 5. Upon its release, the model was equipped with specific guardrails that directed inquiries about sensitive topics like cybersecurity and biology to less capable models. This design was intended to mitigate risks associated with distillation attacks, which involve training weaker models on outputs from advanced AI models. Initially, users affected by these restrictions were not informed of the limitations on their requests, leading to backlash from the AI research community. In the wake of this controversy, Altman has also been embroiled in a legal dispute as Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the organization of poaching talent and accessing confidential information. The tension with Musk reignited recently when Musk derisively referred to Altman as "Scam Altman," prompting Altman to retort about Musk's ambitious plans for space-based data centers. The rivalry between Altman and Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has been growing since Amodei's departure from OpenAI in 2020. Their competitive relationship has been marked by public disagreements and coinciding plans for both companies to go public, indicating that this feud is unlikely to be resolved soon.