Anthropic seeks to keep pace with OpenAI, takes on David Sacks

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is doing everything it can to keep pace with its larger rival, OpenAI. OpenAI is spending money at a historic pace with government support. microsoft and Nvidia. These days, Anthropic faces an equally formidable adversary: ​​the U.S. government.

David Sachs, the venture capitalist who serves as President Donald Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, has publicly criticized what he calls Anthropic’s campaign to support a “leftist vision of AI regulation.”

Sachs slammed the company over X after Anthropic co-founder and AI startup policy director Jack Clark penned an essay this week titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear.”

“Anthropic is implementing a sophisticated regulatory acquisition strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sachs wrote on Tuesday.

On the other hand, OpenAI has established itself as a partner of the White House since the beginning of the second Trump administration. On January 21, the day after the inauguration, President Trump announced the creation of a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure.

Mr. Sachs’ criticism of Anthropic struck at the very foundations of the company and its original reason for existence. Brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI at the end of 2020 to start Anthropic with a mission to build safer AI. OpenAI started as a nonprofit lab in 2015, but with significant funding from Microsoft, it was rapidly moving toward commercialization.

Today, the companies are two of the most valued private AI companies in the United States, with OpenAI valued at $500 billion and Anthropic valued at $183 billion. OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora apps, and Anthropic’s Claude model is particularly popular in enterprises.

When it comes to regulation, companies’ views vary widely. OpenAI has campaigned for fewer guardrails, while Anthropic has opposed some of the Trump administration’s efforts to limit protections.

Antropic has repeatedly pushed back against federal efforts to preempt state-level AI regulation, particularly a Trump-backed provision that would block such regulation for 10 years.

This proposal was part of the draft Big Beautiful Act, but was ultimately abandoned. Anthropic later supported California’s SB 53, which would require transparency and safety disclosures from AI companies, effectively going in the opposite direction from the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have a significant impact on the safety of frontier AI,” Anthropic wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post. “Without that, labs with increasingly powerful models may have more incentive to roll back their own safety and disclosure programs in order to compete.”

Anthropic has not commented on the matter. Mr. Sacks did not respond to requests for comment.

For Sachs, the priority in AI is for the U.S. to innovate as quickly as possible to avoid losing out to China.

“The United States is in an AI race right now, and our main global competitor is China,” Sachs said in an on-stage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “They are the only country that has the talent, resources and technical expertise to basically beat us in AI.”

But Sachs flatly denied that he was trying to destroy Anthropic in the process of lifting up American AI.

In a post to X on Thursday, Sachs took issue with a Bloomberg article that linked his comments to increased federal surveillance of humanity.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Just a few months ago, the White House approved Anthropic’s Claude app to be made available to all departments of government through the GSA App Store.”

Rather, Sachs argued, Anthropic is positioning itself as a political underdog and its leadership as principled defenders of public safety while pursuing a public campaign that views any backlash as a partisan target.

“Anthropic’s political and media strategy has been to consistently position itself as an enemy of the Trump administration,” Sachs said. “But please don’t whine to the media that we are being ‘targeted’ when we have simply articulated our policy disagreements.”

Sachs gave several examples of what he considers hostile acts. He referred to Dario Amodei comparing President Trump to a “feudal warlord” in the 2024 presidential election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Sachs also cited op-eds published by the company opposing key parts of the Trump administration’s AI policy agenda, including a proposed moratorium on national regulations and elements of the Middle East and chip export strategy. Anthropic also hired a senior Biden-era official to lead its government relations team, Sachs noted.

The AI ​​czar particularly took offense to Clark’s essay and warnings about AI’s potentially transformative and destabilizing powers.

“In my own experience, as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop increasingly complex goals. When these goals don’t perfectly match both our preferences and the appropriate context, they behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “Another reason I’m concerned is that we see a path forward, albeit in a very early form, for these systems to start designing successor systems.”

Sachs said this “fear mongering” is hindering innovation.

“Governments are primarily responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem,” Sachs wrote about X.

Anthropic is also distancing itself from actions many other technology companies have taken in an apparent attempt to appease President Trump.

leader of metaOpenAI, and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies, attended White House dinners, poured tens of billions of dollars into U.S. infrastructure projects, and softened their public stance. Amodei was not invited to a recent White House dinner attended by many industry leaders, the company confirmed to The Information.

Still, Anthropic continues to win major federal contracts, including a $200 million deal with the Department of Defense and access to federal agencies through the General Services Administration. It also recently established a National Security Advisory Council to align its activities with U.S. interests and began offering a version of the Claude model to government customers for $1 a year.

But Sachs is not the only influential Republican tech investor to voice criticism of the company.

Keith Lavoie, whose husband works for the Trump administration, joined the neighborhood this week.

“If Antropic actually believes their rhetoric about safety, they can shut down the company at any time,” Lavoie wrote to X. “And that’s when you lobby.”

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger talks about new model releases