Kevin Roose's Atlantic excerpt unpacks the Amodei–Altman feud behind Anthropic's founding
kevinroose · x · 2026-09-29
The first excerpt of Kevin Roose's The AGI Chronicles is out in The Atlantic, chronicling AI's central feud: Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, who have disliked each other for years. Amodei and six colleagues left OpenAI in 2020 to found Anthropic, but the real reasons stayed murky. After a year of digging and 150+ interviews, Roose reconstructs it — involving Microsoft, Kanye West, a secret plan to sell AGI to Russia and China, and a Slack channel called BATNA. At its core: two people who didn't trust each other to build the most powerful technology either could imagine.
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