Kevin Roose: first excerpt of The AGI Chronicles, on the Amodei–Altman feud

Kevin Roose announces the first excerpt of his book The AGI Chronicles in The Atlantic: the feud between Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. He says Amodei and six colleagues left OpenAI in 2020 for reasons nobody knew exactly, and that after a year and 150+ interviews he found out; the story involves Microsoft, Kanye West, a secret plan to sell AGI to Russia and China, and a Slack channel called BATNA.

The first excerpt from The AGI Chronicles is out in @TheAtlantic!

It's the story of the central beef of the AI era: the feud between Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, who have hated each other for years.

Amodei and six of his colleagues left OpenAI in 2020 to start Anthropic, but nobody knew exactly why. After a year of digging and more than 150 interviews, I figured it out.

It involves Microsoft, Kanye West, a secret plan to sell AGI to Russia and China, and a Slack channel called BATNA.

Most of all, it involves two people who didn't trust each other to build the most powerful technology either of them could imagine -- a mutual enmity that still fuels the AI race today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/?gift=yOCyPCgFlJHcmtVyKr47rhGAB_Df6W1HFhl_sAnIi4o&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

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Archived 2026-09-30 via fxtwitter (unofficial).