Altman told OpenAI staff he tried to 'save' Anthropic
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- Sam Altman told OpenAI employees in Slack messages dated Feb. 24 through March 2 that he was trying to 'save' Anthropic during its collapsing Pentagon negotiations, according to internal messages seen by Axios.
- Defense Under Secretary Emil Michael called Altman first on the afternoon of Feb. 24, and the two sides began exchanging draft contract language the next day — while Altman was still telling staff he wanted to help de-escalate the Anthropic standoff.
- On Feb. 27, Altman told a core group of staff he found it 'strange' to be working to save a rival whose CEO had, 'in his view, spent years trying to destroy OpenAI' — the same day he announced OpenAI had struck its own deal and asked the government to extend the same terms to other AI companies.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dismissed Altman's peacemaker framing as 'straight up lies' in a leaked memo and later apologized for the remark.
- A March 2 Slack message shows Altman acknowledging a critical obstacle he said he hadn't anticipated: OpenAI's contract included a carve-out requiring the Pentagon to negotiate separately before deploying ChatGPT in intelligence agencies like the NSA — a carve-out the Pentagon said it could not offer Anthropic because Claude is already deeply embedded across those agencies.
- OpenAI arguably won the contract but lost the public-relations fight, as the messages portrayed Altman as both de-escalator and primary beneficiary of a deal Anthropic had just lost.
Why it matters: OpenAI won the Pentagon contract Anthropic lost, but the leaked Slack messages reveal Altman privately framing Amodei as an adversary even while publicly playing peacemaker — and expose a structural asymmetry the deal created: the intelligence-agency carve-out in OpenAI's contract cannot be replicated for Anthropic because Claude is already embedded at the NSA, leaving Anthropic with a fundamentally weaker deal even if negotiations resume.
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