Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once wanted OpenAI to stop taking money from billionaire investor Peter Thiel. The trigger was the $1.25 million Thiel gave to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, a move Amodei said made him “morally worthy of condemnation.” At the time, Amodei was a few months into his job at OpenAI, where he led the safety team. He posted the remarks on the company’s internal messaging app, according to a report by The New York Times.Thiel’s money found its way to Amodei anyway, a decade later. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm Thiel co-founded, made its first direct investment in Anthropic in February this year. It co-led a $30 billion funding round that valued the company at $380 billion, and reportedly put in about $1.25 billion of its own. The firm is an OpenAI investor too, which gives it a stake in both rival labs.
Amodei’s Peter Thiel remarks came days after 2016 United States elections
Three days after Trump won the US presidential election in November 2016, Amodei posted on OpenAI’s internal chat that he feared the country was drifting toward authoritarianism. He also said he was uneasy doing research on militarily powerful technology in such a country, the NYT reported, citing the messages. That concern has since run through his clashes with the Pentagon over military uses of AI.Thiel was an outlier in Silicon Valley that year. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder spoke at the Republican National Convention. In October 2016 he committed his $1.25 million, split between super PACs and direct contributions to the campaign. Most of the tech industry’s political money was going to Hillary Clinton.He was also tied to OpenAI from day one. When the lab was set up as a nonprofit in December 2015, Thiel was among the donors named alongside Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman and Amazon Web Services. Together they pledged $1 billion.
Sam Altman stood by Thiel while Amodei wanted him out
Altman’s ties to Thiel ran deeper. Thiel was the largest outside investor in Hydrazine, the venture fund Altman started in 2012 after selling his first startup, Loopt. Altman has credited Thiel and Paul Graham with shaping how he invests.Thiel was a part-time partner at Y Combinator at the time, and some people called for the accelerator to drop him. Altman pushed back publicly in October 2016. “YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee,” he wrote on Twitter, now X. Weeks later, Amodei was making the opposite case inside OpenAI.Amodei didn’t just want certain money out. He also helped bring other money in. In 2017, he connected OpenAI with the philanthropy run by Holden Karnofsky, where he was a technical adviser. That organisation, now called Coefficient Giving, donated $30 million to OpenAI, and Karnofsky joined its board. Karnofsky married Amodei’s sister Daniela later that year.
Amodei’s break from OpenAI ended with Thiel’s firm backing Anthropic
Tensions grew after Daniela joined OpenAI in 2018. That December, researcher Joshua Achiam told Altman it would be unwise to make Amodei chief ethics officer. When Achiam pushed for an outside expert, Amodei confronted him and insisted no one was better suited, people with knowledge of the discussions told the NYT.The breaking point came over GPT, the project the siblings had taken over. Amodei repeatedly told Altman he would leave if president Greg Brockman wasn’t kept away from the work. Altman refused. In December 2020, the Amodeis and several colleagues quit, and Anthropic was founded four weeks later.Political money has remained a sore point. Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC, in September 2025, according to federal filings reported by Bloomberg. Amodei has since called that donation “evil” in messages to colleagues, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year.A decade on, Amodei’s views on political money have barely shifted, even as his own company’s list of investors has grown more complicated. Anthropic is now preparing to go public on Nasdaq later this month.When those shares list, the firm founded by the man Amodei once wanted OpenAI to shun will sit among Anthropic’s backers.