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

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is doing all it can to keep pace with larger rival OpenAI, which is spending money at a historic pace with backing from Microsoft and Nvidia. Of late, Anthropic has been facing an equally daunting antagonist: the U.S. government.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, has been publicly criticizing Anthropic for what he’s called a campaign by the company to support “the Left’s vision of AI regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, AI startup’s head of policy, wrote an essay this week titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” Sacks lashed out against the company on X.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks wrote on Tuesday.

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

Sacks’ criticism of Anthropic hits on the company’s very foundation and its original reason for being. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 and started Anthropic with a mission to build safer AI. OpenAI had started as a nonprofit lab in 2015, but was rapidly moving towards commercialization, with hefty funding from Microsoft.

Now they’re the two most highly valued private AI companies in the country, with OpenAI commanding a $500 billion valuation and Anthropic capturing a valuation of $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, the companies have very different views. OpenAI has lobbied for fewer guardrails, while Anthropic has opposed part of the Trump administration’s effort to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly pushed back against efforts by the federal government to preempt state-level regulation of AI, most notably a Trump-backed provision that would have blocked such rules for 10 years.

That proposal, part of the draft “Big Beautiful Bill,” was ultimately abandoned. Anthropic later endorsed 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 an important impact on frontier AI safety,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post on Sept. 8. “Without it, labs with increasingly powerful models could face growing incentives to dial back their own safety and disclosure programs in order to compete.” 

Anthropic didn’t provide a comment for this story. Sacks didn’t respond to a…