A Wall Street Journal report has peeled back the layers on the messy personal and professional feud that predated the mass exodus of Anthropic's founding team from OpenAI. At the center of it: OpenAI president Greg Brockman and the Amodei siblings, Dario and Daniela.
Brockman, a technical genius, was known inside the company for his aggressive, boundary-crossing "bigfooting" management style. He'd try to dodge administrative meetings, aiming to spend 80% of his time writing code, but often barged into team projects without context, trampling on others' work and racking up complaints from colleagues.
The friction peaked early on. Brockman's heavy-handed interference in a project ostracized a top researcher, enraging the then-project lead, Dario Amodei, who would later found Anthropic. Amodei's drastic countermeasure: he banned Brockman from working on the predecessor project that eventually led to ChatGPT. That workplace fracture not only spurred Amodei's team to leave and start Anthropic but also laid the groundwork for future power struggles. During the Thanksgiving 2023 boardroom coup, when co-founder Ilya Sutskever ousted Sam Altman, one of the core reasons cited was that Altman couldn't rein in Brockman.
The personal drama is equally gripping. In 2018, Brockman fell for Anna at first sight and started dating her. Daniela Amodei, now Anthropic's president, was convinced the relationship wouldn't last, and bet Brockman $100 that Anna wasn't his soulmate. A year later, they got married at OpenAI's headquarters, with a robotic arm serving as best man and delivering the rings. Daniela showed up with a crisp $100 check.
After the rift, old closeness shattered. When Sutskever — once inseparable from Brockman — officially left OpenAI in late 2024, the two sides went through agonizing negotiations to keep each other. In the end, Brockman's wife Anna sent Sutskever a potted cactus as a final farewell, a prickly symbol of an era's end.