Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

8 people left OpenAI to start Anthropic

17 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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Eight OpenAI employees left to start Anthropic because they felt safety wasn't the top priority at OpenAI, despite the company's internal structure of three competing tribes meant to balance safety, research, and startup interests. They wanted to build a company where AI safety came first.

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Famously, you and 8 of you left OpenAI back in the end of 2020 to start Anthropic. What is it that you saw at OpenAI that made you feel like, okay, we got to go do our own thing?
One weird thing about OpenAI is that while I was there, Sam talked about having 3 tribes that needed to be kept in check with each other, which was the safety tribe, the research tribe, and the startup tribe. And I think when push came to shove, we felt like safety wasn't the top priority there. So that was fundamentally why we left. We felt like we wanted an organization where we could be on the frontier, we could be doing the fundamental research, but we could be prioritizing safety ahead of everything else.