Read Anthropic CEO’s Memo Attacking OpenAI’s ‘Mendacious’ Pentagon Announcement⁠↗

The kind of “safety layer” stuff that Palantir offered us (and presumably offered OpenAI) is even worse: our sense was that it was almost entirely safety theater, and that Palantir assumed that our problem was “you have some unhappy employees, you need to offer them something that placates them or makes what is happening invisible to them, and that’s the service we provide”.

the main reason OAI accepted them and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses. They don’t have zero efficacy, and we’re doing many of them as well, but they are nowhere near sufficient for purpose. It is simultaneously the case that the DoW did not treat OpenAI and us the same here.

A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them. I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I’ve seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize: He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to “set the same contract for everyone in the industry” — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker. Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.

The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg [Brockman, OpenAI’s president] have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce “safety theater” for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).

Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.