What Anthropic CEO said in the memo that has made him go on live TV and say: I want to completely apologise for this memo
In his first interview since the Pentagon labelled the AI lab Anthropic a Supply-chain Risk, CEO Dario Amodei has taken a complete U-turn. Anthropic CEO has publicly apologised for the memo that he sent to employees soon after the company’s talks with Pentagon (Department of War) broke down. Amodei has offered a Mea Culpa for the way he handled the crisis that he described as one of the most “disorienting” in Anthropic’s history. Incidentally, the “sorry’ from Anthropic CEO comes after he won a legion of fans for his strong stance in a dispute over how AI could be used by the military. Not only has he been hailed as a hero, but Anthropic’s Claude too has gained a flood of new users, and majority of them switching from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the interview with The Economist, Amodei has said sorry for the message and stressed that he would not characterise it as a formal memo. Amodei’s public apology follows an internal memo from the CEO, leaked to The Information, in which he took aim at OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for being a ‘yes man’ to President Donald Trump and his administration. The 1600-word memo also reportedly criticised the Pentagon. In the statement, Amodei said that he would want to offer a complete apology “for the tone” of the memo, adding it had been written within hours of a chaotic series of announcements and did not reflect his “careful or considered views.” He said, “I post things in Slack. I post them a lot. And the culture within the company is that I’m very free, and you know, it’s not a really considered or refined version of my thinking. It’s not what I would say on reflection.” he said.
What Anthropic CEO wrote in the memo he is now saying sorry for
* In the memo to employees, reported by The Information, Amodei referred to OpenAI’s dealings with the Department of Defense as “safety theater.” “The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DoD’s deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses,” Amodei wrote.* In the letter, Amodei refers to OpenAI’s messaging as “straight up lies,” stating that Altman is falsely “presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.” Amodei accused Altman of offering “dictator-style praise to Trump.”* “I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with the DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!),” Amodei wrote to his staff. “It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.”
Anthropic CEO makes a promise to Pentagon
On Thursday, the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a supply chain risk. With this, Anthropic becomes the first-ever American company to be designated as national security risk. However, striking a conciliatory note in his statement, Amodei pledged that Anthropic would continue supplying its models to the Department of War at nominal cost for as long as needed, to avoid leaving warfighters without tools during active operations: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” he wrote. In the posts he further adds that the company’s “most important goal now is making sure that our war fighters and national security experts are not deprived of the important tools in the middle of war.”
