Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, faces off with David Sacks

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is scrambling to keep pace with bigger rival OpenAI, which is spending money at a record pace with the support of Microsoft i Nvidia. Lately, Anthropic has faced an equally daunting antagonist: the US government.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who serves as President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, has been publicly criticizing Anthropic for what he has called the company’s campaign to support “the left’s view of artificial intelligence regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, the AI ​​startup’s head of policy, wrote a essay this week titled “Technological Optimism and Adequate Fear,” Sacks railed against the company at X.

“Anthropic is pursuing a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks he wrote on tuesday

OpenAI, meanwhile, has been established as a White House partner since the start of Trump’s second administration. On January 21, the day after the inauguration, Trump announced a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in US AI infrastructure.

Sacks’ criticisms of Anthropic’s achievements on the very foundation of the company and its original raison d’être. Brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI at the end of 2020 and started Anthropic with a mission to create a safer AI. OpenAI had started as a non-profit lab in 2015, but was moving quickly towards commercialization, with major funding from Microsoft.

They are now the two most highly valued private AI companies in the country, with OpenAI boasting a $500 billion valuation and Anthropic valued at $183 billion. OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora apps, while Anthropic’s Claude models are particularly popular in the enterprise.

When it comes to regulation, companies have very different views. OpenAI has pushed to reduce the barriers, while Anthropic has opposite part of the Trump administration’s effort to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly rejected federal government efforts to prevent AI regulation at the state level, most notably a Trump-backed provision that would have blocked those rules for 10 years.

This proposal, part of the “Big Beautiful Bill” draft, was eventually abandoned. Anthropic later endorsed California’s SB 53that would require transparency and security disclosures from AI companies, effectively going in the opposite direction of the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have a significant impact on border AI security,” Anthropic wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post. “Without this, labs with increasingly powerful models could face increasing incentives to scale back their own safety and disclosure programs to compete.”

Anthropic has not provided any comments for this story. Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.

For Sacks, the priority in AI is to innovate as quickly as possible to ensure that the United States does not lose out to China.

“The United States is currently in an AI race, and our main global competition is China,” Sacks said in an onstage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “They’re the only other country that has the talent, the resources and the technological expertise to basically beat us in AI.”

But Sacks has flatly denied that he is trying to eliminate Anthropic in the process of lifting US artificial intelligence.

In a post on X on Thursday, Sacks contested a Bloomberg story who linked his comments to growing federal scrutiny of Anthropic.

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

Rather, Sacks asserted that Anthropic has cast itself as a political underdog, positioning its leadership as principled advocates of public safety while pursuing a public campaign that frames any rollback as a partisan goal.

“It has been Anthropic’s government affairs and media strategy to consistently position itself as an enemy of the Trump administration,” Sacks said. “But don’t complain to the media that you’re being ‘targeted’ when all we’ve done is articulate a political disagreement.”

Sacks pointed to several examples of what he considers adversarial actions. He referenced Dario Amodei’s comparison of Trump to a “feudal warlord” during the 2024 election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ campaign for president.

Sacks also referenced op-eds the company published opposing key parts of the Trump administration’s policy agenda, including its proposed moratorium on state-level regulation and elements of its chip export and Middle East strategy. Anthropic also hired senior Biden-era officials to lead its government relations team, Sacks noted.

The AI ​​czar was particularly outraged by Clark’s essay and its warnings about the potentially transformative and destabilizing power of artificial intelligence.

“My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop increasingly complicated goals. When those goals aren’t absolutely aligned with both our preferences and the right context, the AI ​​systems will behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “Another reason for my fear is that I see a path for these systems to begin to design their successors, albeit in a very early form.”

Sacks said this “fear-mongering” is holding back innovation.

“It is primarily responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem,” Sacks wrote in X.

Anthropic has also steered clear of actions many other tech companies have taken explicitly to appease Trump.

Leaders of GoalOpenAI and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies, attending White House dinners, committing tens of billions of dollars to US infrastructure projects and softening their public stances. Amodei was not invited to a recent White House dinner attended by numerous industry leaders, the company confirmed to The Information.

Still, Anthropic continues to hold important federal contracts, including a $200 million deal with the Department of Defense and access to federal agencies through the General Services Administration. Also recently formed a national security advisory council to align its work with US interests and began offering a version of its Claude model to government clients for $1 a year.

But Sacks isn’t the only influential Republican tech investor to voice criticism of the company.

Keith Rabois, whose husband works in the Trump administration, entered the mix this week.

“If Anthropic really believed their rhetoric about security, they can always shut down the company,” Rabois wrote to X. “And then press on.”

WATCH: Mike Krieger of Anthropic at the launch of the new model