Days after Anthropic secretly filed to go public, beating OpenAI in the closely watched IPO race among AI giants, Daniela Amodei, the company’s co-founder and president, sought to more clearly distinguish between the contenders. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion, with expectations that it could exceed $1 trillion in the public markets, compared to OpenAI’s valuation of roughly $900 billion. But as Amodei puts it, competition isn’t just about numbers, it’s about how the technology itself is built and used.
“The main reason we launched Anthropic is to be able to build and develop this technology in an ethical, responsible and fair way, and I think that’s an obligation for everyone in the company, but in particular, the leadership, all these numbers, is not really the point,” Amodei said at this year’s Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco yesterday (June 4).
Anthropic was founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including Daniela and her brother Dario, who is the company’s CEO, with the goal of building a more transparent and safety-focused AI company. Its departure from OpenAI extends beyond positioning to how it plans growth.
The company emphasized securing computing power, including a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which acquired xAI earlier this year) for access to its data centers in Memphis that will cost $1.25 billion a month. But Amodei said Anthropic is deliberately avoiding the aggressive spending levels seen elsewhere. OpenAI expects to spend up to $600 billion on computing by 2030; Anthropic expects to spend roughly a third of that amount.
“The structure of these deals is that you have to commit to a certain amount of compute reasonably upfront, and [we don’t want to] “We overextend ourselves so that we buy more computing than we can use productively,” Amodei explained. “We would much rather be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we can deliver versus the opposite, where you go over target and then you’re not in a great position, because you bought something you can’t pay for in the future.”
While Anthropic has also expressed interest in more speculative infrastructure, such as SpaceX’s proposed orbital data centers, “there are no immediate plans to work with astronauts to operate space-based data centers,” Amodei said. “But you never know,” she added.
Product strategy represents another key dichotomy. Anthropic prioritized enterprise use cases and programming over mass-market consumer engagement. This contrasts with OpenAI, where More than 70 percent of users use ChatGPT It is associated with personal tasks such as research, tutoring, and life advice.
“We have always felt that enterprise and business are the best spiritual fit for humanity and our values,” Amodei said. “The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we are not a tool for entertainment. In fact, it is for productive activities, whether they are at work or at home.”
However, both companies are investing heavily in advanced cybersecurity, and Claude Mythos of AI Anthropic has raised concerns about their ability to exploit vulnerabilities. OpenAI’s Daybreak targets similar risks but takes a different approach to deployment.
Daybreak is integrated into existing GPT workflows and is offered in tiered access based on user verification. Mythos operates as a closed consortium limited to vetted organizations in about 15 countries, including the US government, NATO, ENISA, Samsung, and Okta.
“You have to give the defenders a head start,” Amodei said. “AI models will continue to advance. If we don’t release a legend-level model one day [to the public]another company working in the field of artificial intelligence.
Anthropic also took a more cautious stance on government action. The company withdrew from a contract with the Pentagon related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, which OpenAI later took over. However, Amodei described broader cooperation with the US government as positive.
“Every company is going to have its own principles of what their red lines are and what their values are,” she said. “It’s important, whatever those values are for you as a company, that you are true to them, and that you feel able to explain them to employees and to the wider world.”
