Dario Amodei: OpenAI President Brockman's $25 Million Dollar Donation To Pro-Trump Super PAC Is Evil, Also Compares Altman And Elon To Hitler And Stalin

A bombshell Wall Street Journal report has exposed the decade-long, deeply personal feud between OpenAI's leadership and Dario Amodei, the co-founder who left to create its top competitor, Anthropic. The article reveals Amodei's scorching internal critiques: he compared the legal battle between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to "the fight between Hitler and Stalin," dubbed a $25 million donation by OpenAI President Greg Brockman to a pro-Trump super PAC as "evil," and likened OpenAI to tobacco companies "knowingly hawking a harmful product." These views crystallized during a period Amodei found needlessly cruel, watching colleagues be fired after Musk requested a spreadsheet evaluating staff contributions.

The rift widened over fundamental disagreements about AI safety and commercialization. Amodei was horrified by a proposal, briefly considered within OpenAI, to sell artificial general intelligence (AGI) to the nuclear powers of the UN Security Council, which he saw as tantamount to treason. Combined with feelings of being sidelined—such as being left out of a meeting with Barack Obama—Amodei's discontent reached a breaking point. In late 2020, he demanded to report directly to the board and stated he could no longer work with Brockman. When his terms were not met, Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei, and nearly a dozen other key employees departed.

This exodus directly birthed Anthropic, now a $15B+ company and OpenAI's most significant rival. The report frames the current AI arms race not just as a technological competition, but as the direct outcome of this acrimonious philosophical schism over safety, ethics, and power. Within five years, the splinter group is now lining up banks for its own IPO, racing to go public before the company they abandoned.