SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI’s board of directors approached rival Anthropic’s chief executive officer about replacing the ousted Sam Altman and potentially merging the two artificial intelligence start-ups, according to two sources briefed on the matter.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declined on both fronts, the sources said.
The news, reported earlier by The Information yesterday, follows various reported calls to find Altman’s successor days after OpenAI’s board ousted him.
OpenAI declined to comment and board member Adam D’Angelo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Sunday, the board offered ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to be its interim chief, who accepted. Meanwhile, Altman agreed to join the start-up’s backer Microsoft along with other key personnel from OpenAI.
By yesterday, nearly all of the start-up’s more than 700 employees threatened to quit, including one of the executives on OpenAI’s now four-person board.
The co-founders of Anthropic, who were also executives at OpenAI until 2020, had broken from their employer over disagreements regarding how to ensure AI’s safe development and governance.
Anthropic has won investments from Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com. Its Claude AI models have vied for prominence with OpenAI’s GPT series.