Anthropic's Dario Amodei can't always have his way

Anthropic PBC has benefited from the single-minded focus of a leader who doesn’t waver from his decisions. But that advantage could become a liability as it speeds toward an initial public offering in the middle of a febrile market, with the Nasdaq having fallen about 6% in the past month and the possible ouster of Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang sapping confidence in the artificial intelligence trade. 

Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei is seen as one of Silicon Valley’s most dogged and principled technology executives. Where the more flexible Sam Altman was willing to bend to the whims of the Pentagon earlier this year over its use of OpenAI’s technology, Amodei stood firm against it.

While Altman has explored several potential revenue paths — pursuing a consumer business for ChatGPT, building an artificial intelligence device with Jony Ive and investing in robotics — Amodei has kept Anthropic laser-focused on selling AI services to businesses.

He also maintains a much tighter culture at Anthropic, one where employees are expected to adhere to the belief that AI could wipe out humanity and that the company must race to set an example on safety by building the most powerful systems possible. Former employees have told me that while being in ideological lockstep has made the company a prolific creator of product features, staff also feel they can’t question the company line.

Altman took a fluid approach to OpenAI’s IPO, delaying it amid financial and security concerns. Amodei, meanwhile, has stuck with his plan to go public before Thanksgiving, on the week of Nov. 16. That’s remarkable given the sporadic selling off tech stocks and growing doubts about whether the AI industry can justify its enormous spending.

Anthropic has at least shown some flexibility on price. Its expected valuation of about $1.3 trillion or so is well below the $2 trillion figure floated just weeks ago. But its refusal to budge on timing could have significant implications for the market and economy, with the company now a bellwether for the business of frontier AI as well as the vast infrastructure needed to power it.

The bigger test of Amodei’s willingness to compromise, however, may come after the IPO, when he has to answer to public investors. Anthropic’s founders are set to retain 50.1% of the company’s voting power and most of its directors are chosen by a special trust set up to protect its safety mission. The company seems to want Wall Street’s money without giving investors much say in how it’s run. Of course, that’s not so unusual given Silicon Valley’s penchant for giving founders outsized control — see: Meta Platforms Inc. and any company run by Elon Musk — but it’s also a sign of Amodei’s conviction.  

He has long said that Anthropic is leading a "race to the top" on safety standards. Going public before archrival OpenAI would help seal his company’s status as an AI firm leading the world toward a better future.

For the CEO, the race is existential. His beliefs go back to when he read Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, as a PhD student and became deeply involved in the rationalist and effective altruist movements that warned of an AI doomsday. Amodei preaches that building superintelligent systems as quickly as possible is the only way to get ahead of the "least cautious actors."

That sense of moral certainty about Anthropic’s mission has made the company somewhat difficult to deal with; several developers and corporate advisers have privately complained to me about Anthropic’s hubris and rigidity on matters like its zero-day retention policies on data.

For Amodei and his company’s financial position, that inflexibility could be costly in a shifting AI landscape. The results of the midterm elections suggest that building data centers will now get slower and more expensive, and Anthropic is already paying more for compute than OpenAI, having invested in infrastructure and chips late. In fact, its S-1 filing showed that in the last quarter, Anthropic’s computing costs grew faster than its revenue for the first time.

And while providers of computing power can barely keep up with current demand, it’s unclear how quickly these huge investments will be monetized and whether appetite will still be there in two or three years’ time.(1)

Anthropic became remarkably successful because Amodei identified and acted early on his beliefs about safety and enterprise AI, and pursued them with conviction. But being repeatedly right has a downside: It can usher in the dangerous belief that holding your ground is always the answer.

While Anthropic’s willingness to adjust its valuation suggests its CEO is willing to compromise on certain things, control is not necessarily one of them. What happens when his principles clash with the demands of his public investors? Some greater flexibility may be in order for the very singular Amodei. 

(1) Much depends on whether businesses like banks and healthcare companies pay for AI agents to do more administrative work in areas like sales and human resources. If they do, Silicon Valley is betting that AI agents will become a major source of demand for data centers and keep the revenue for Anthropic, OpenAI and others rolling in. But so far, many businesses are still in the experimentation phase with agents. Only 17% of organizations have deployed AI agents, according to research firm Gartner, while more than 40% of the projects currently underway are expected to be canceled before the end of 2027.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of "Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World."