Why Did Anthropic's Founders Leave OpenAI?

Kevin Roose says Dario Amodei and his six co-founders left OpenAI because Sam Altman kept telling them one thing and someone else something different, or making a promise he did not follow through on. There was no single inciting incident. The pattern runs back to the founding days of OpenAI.

Altman is very good at reading the room and understanding what people want him to do in a given moment. That skill is a huge asset when he raises money from Masa Son and other investors. It let OpenAI scale quickly and get back in the good graces of the Trump administration by saying things that administration wanted to hear. The same habit is a superpower, a liability, or something in between, depending on the view of him.

Roose says a large chunk of the public calls Altman "Scam Altman." He agrees with Alex Kantrowitz that the nickname mostly comes from Elon Musk's fans, and he thinks it sticks better than "Swindley Sam," an earlier nickname he attributes to Musk.