ChatGPT v. Claude.AI

Another look at OpenAI's capped profit versus Anthropic's long-term benefit trust

An AI image of “chatpgt versus Claude.ai as rock-em-sock-em robots”

NYTimes author Ezra Klein’s most recent podcasts tackle the long term societal implications of generative A.I. This week he interviews Dario Amodei, cofounder of Anthropic. It has some jaw-dropping moments in it, I have to admit.

Anthropic is the creator of Claude.ai, the serif-fonted cousin of ChatGPT. In the A.I. wars, Anthropic is aligned with one of its major investors, Amazon, whereas ChatGPT is owned (sort of) by Microsoft.

Last year, OpenAI’s “capped profit” governance structure became national news when CEO Sam Altman was fired and rehired within the span of a couple of weeks. Derek Thompson, another favorite podcaster of mine, summed up my knee-jerk reaction: this was a story about the failure of OpenAI’s experiment in corporate governance.

What Klein’s podcast and Thompson’s article both missed, and which our friends at Transform Finance pointed out, is that there is an alternative to OpenAI’s convoluted ownership structure, one already in place at its competitor, Anthropic. As EO'+WD’s Tiffany Vargas discusses, Anthropic is now a long-term benefit trust, a version of the purpose trusts that we write about here at EO+WD.

For more, check out Tiffany’s article and the case study put together by John Morley and the other attorneys who helped created the trust.