The Real Reason Anthropic's CEO Walked Away From Sam Altman

00:00There was a moment at India's AI summit where you and Sam Altman appeared to refuse to hold hands on stage. What happened there? >> What happened is that the summit was extremely disorganized. We all came up at the last minute and they like changed the order in which we were standing and then like they took a picture of us and then they ordered us all to like hold hands. You know, if you've ever been to one of these summit I'm not saying anything bad about India in particular but like all of these kind of international type summits that have like heads of state are like super disorganized. >> Okay, but everyone else held hands. Come on. >> I I look I I don't know I don't know what to tell you, okay? There was like,

00:38you know, Narendra Modi up there suddenly telling everyone to like suddenly [laughter] telling everyone to hold hands. >> All right, all right. Well, okay, look. Sam and Elon are suing each other. You don't like Sam. I I it seems. If the people building the most important technology in the world can't hold hands on stage, how can we trust you'll cooperate on existential risk? >> There are some players who are more trustworthy than others and you know, I think there are players outside Anthropic who you know, who who I trust who I see as trustworthy. What I think needs to happen is that the trustworthy actors need to need to get together and and put the untrustworthy actors in a position where they kind of have to adopt the

01:20same standards. With a lot of experience, I've learned that there are some folks who don't do the right thing on their own. But if there's a majority of the industry that's doing the right thing, then I think the rest of the industry is is kind of they're left in a position where there's not much they can do that that that then come along. >> Your decision to leave Open AI has become Silicon Valley lore. What really happened? Like beyond the narrative, what were the issues? What did you disagree on? >> Look, I'll I'm going to say it. I'm going to say it very simply. You know, there are many valid disagreements to be had on safety. We certainly had some of those disagreements with them, but you

01:58know, people that that that that alone is not sufficient to leave. People here have had disagreements with me. People here have disagreements with each other. But, when you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest, when you feel that they're not in it for the reasons that they say, um when you see disturbing uh uh patterns of behavior, dishonesty, that makes it very hard to, you know, to continue to work with a company, to continue to trust the company. And look, at the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them? Like, the way the the way to resolve it is you go off and do your

02:44thing, they go off and do their thing. And I am completely at peace with uh the idea that we're doing things our way and they're doing things their way. We'll see who wins in the market and we'll see who wins in the court of public opinion.