FTX-Linked Anthropic Declines OpenAI’s Merger and Leadership Offer

Amid leadership changes at OpenAI, Anthropic, backed by FTX, has turned down an offer to merge and take on a leading role, according to The Information.

The Information reports that after OpenAI’s board fired the former CEO Sam Altman, the company approached its rival company Anthropic and to the CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei to take over as its CEO and discussed the possibility of merging the two AI entities, as revealed by “person with direct knowledge.” Amodei turned down the offer. “It’s not clear whether the merger proposal led to any serious discussion,” said the report.

Later on, Reuters also confirmed OpenAI’s proposal of the merger and the attempt to recruit Amodei, according to “two people briefed on the matter.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees including Dario Amodei. Amodei worked as Vice President of Research at OpenAI until 2020, leading “the efforts to build GPT-2 and GPT-3.” He was also “one of two people who sets overall research direction at OpenAI and writes its annual research roadmap,” according to his LinkedIn page.

FTX’s Investment in Anthropic

A Bloomberg report mentioned that the now failed FTX and Alameda invested $500 million in Anthropic, according to “an internal document circulated before last November’s bankruptcy filing.” This investment would position Anthropic as one of FTX’s largest investments, second only to the $1.5 billion allocated to the crypto miner Genesis Digital.

The turbulences of ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI and the twisted future path of Sam Altman resulted in the fluctuating price of Worldcoin (WLD), which was launched by Altman’s co-founded company Tools for Humanity. WLD is currently trading at $2.41, according to CoinMarketCap.

We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett…

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 20, 2023

Sam Altman, on the other hand, is confirmed to join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, said Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.