{
  "id": 10665115,
  "title": "Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/29/inside-the-biggest-feud-in-artificial-intelligence",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-29T10:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Atlantic",
    "slug": "the-atlantic",
    "url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "San Francisco in the mid-2020s resembles Los Alamos in 1943, with engineers working around the clock on systems of immense consequence. Ambitious visionaries promote AI's transformative potential, while politicians monitor the project's advancement. However, the implications of success remain elusive. At the heart of this endeavor stands Dario Amodei, a Princeton-educated physicist who left Google for OpenAI in 2016. Amodei, known for his intense focus and unconventional ideas, penned the infamous \"Big Blob of Compute\" essay in 2017, laying out his theory on machine intelligence emerging from scale. This concept guided OpenAI's research toward large language models, with Amodei convinced they could lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a human-level intelligence. By 2020, three teams vied for AGI, but Amodei's team, formed under his guidance, was silently assembling to develop GPT-4. Despite his success, Amodei grew disillusioned with OpenAI's leadership. He accused Sam Altman of being manipulative and Greg Brockman of being power-hungry. Amodei also disapproved of OpenAI's shift to a commercial model, diverging from its nonprofit mission. The final straw was OpenAI's \"countries plan,\" a fundraising scheme proposed by Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever in 2017. The plan, which aimed to auction AGI rights to governments, horrified Amodei. He believed it contradicted OpenAI's mission and disrespected the safety team's dedication. This revelation marked Amodei's breaking point, prompting him to warn his team about OpenAI's deteriorating situation.",
  "summary": "A new world has arrived. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman cannot stop fighting over it.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}