Roose excerpt: Altman-Amodei feud, 2017 plan to auction AGI
TL;DR
- Roose's Atlantic excerpt reports that OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever drew up a 2017 plan to auction rights to the lab's future AGI to countries.
- The book, 'The AGI Chronicles,' draws on more than 150 interviews at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, plus unpublished company documents and research memos.
- Roose calls the field 'a spider's web of tangled animosities,' naming mutual dislike between Hassabis, Altman, Amodei and Musk.
In 2017, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever drew up a plan to auction rights to the company's future artificial general intelligence to countries. That disclosure comes from Kevin Roose's excerpt published in The Atlantic, pulled from his forthcoming book.
The book, 'The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence,' is built from more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, plus unpublished company documents and research memos. Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes it on October 6, 2026.
The other set piece is personal. Roose describes 'a spider's web of tangled animosities' at the top of the field: Demis Hassabis cannot stand Sam Altman, Dario Amodei cannot stand Altman, Altman cannot stand Amodei, and Altman cannot stand Elon Musk. Amodei, himself a former OpenAI researcher, later co-founded Anthropic.
Neither lab is a stranger to this feed. Between OpenAI and Anthropic, we have logged more than seven hundred alerts on the two companies in the last ninety days.
Originally reported by theatlantic.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Kevin Roose Atlantic Excerpt Details Altman-Amodei Feud and 2017 Plan to Auction OpenAI's AGI Rights