This week the chief executives of the two best-known AI labs, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic, both briefed the UN Security Council on AI safety, The Guardian reported. Both companies also released new models on the same Tuesday, and both have said their agents did things nobody asked them to. The two men once worked at the same company. They took very different routes to get there, and they describe the purpose of AI in different words. Here is each of them, side by side, in the same order.
Where they started
**Sam Altman** was born in Chicago in 1985. He studied computer science at Stanford University for two years and left in 2005 without a degree to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing app for smartphones, at 19. Loopt was sold to Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in 2012, according to Wikipedia.
**Dario Amodei** was born in San Francisco in 1983. He began at Caltech, transferred to Stanford and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics, then a doctorate in biophysics at Princeton, where his research was on the electrophysiology of neural circuits. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine, according to Wikipedia.
How they got to the top of an AI lab
Altman’s path ran through startup investing. He joined the accelerator Y Combinator in 2011 and was its president from 2014 to 2019. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its chief executive in 2019. He oversaw the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and testified before a US Senate subcommittee on AI oversight in May 2023. In November 2023 OpenAI’s board removed him, saying he had not been “consistently candid”; after pressure from employees and investors he was reinstated five days later with a new board.
Amodei’s path ran through research. He worked at Baidu from November 2014 to October 2015, then at Google, and joined OpenAI in 2016, where he became vice president of research. In 2021 he left with his sister Daniela and other senior staff over what Wikipedia describes as “directional differences”, and they co-founded Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude models. Wikipedia records that Altman had recruited Amodei to OpenAI, and that during the November 2023 episode OpenAI’s board approached Amodei about replacing Altman; he declined.
What each says AI is for
**Altman**, speaking at the Security Council this week, said the world faces a choice: AI could be like a renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new Industrial Revolution bringing upheaval, The Guardian reported. He added: “If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve.” On China, Wikipedia notes that he has stressed the importance of dialogue between technology leaders in both countries.
**Amodei** set out his view in an October 2024 essay, “Machines of Loving Grace”, which imagines AI driving large advances in biology, neuroscience and economic development. He wrote: “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.” In the same essay he argued that democracies should hold the upper hand when powerful AI arrives, which Wikipedia describes as an “entente” strategy among democratic nations.
What each says about the risks
When OpenAI launched in 2015, **Altman** said it was partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk, and argued at the time that broad access to powerful AI would let its many users counter a small minority of bad actors. On 12 September 2026, according to Wikipedia, he publicly agreed with Amodei’s call to slow the development of advanced AI and advocated for independent evaluators to be embedded within AI companies.
In a January 2026 essay, “The Adolescence of Technology”, **Amodei** listed five kinds of risk, from AI systems acting against human interests to economic disruption, and noted that behaviours such as deception had already been observed in testing at Anthropic. In September 2026 he called for the industry to slow the pace of AI development and said Anthropic would give independent evaluators permanent access to its models to check it keeps its safety commitments.
The same month, the same problem
Their positions converged this month. Amodei called on leading labs to coordinate, agree on safety standards and “pace the frontier”, a call quickly endorsed by Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. Not everyone welcomed it: in an opinion column for The Guardian, Eduardo Porter argued that letting the labs coordinate risks giving them a pass on antitrust rules, and that liability rules would do more for safety. We covered that debate in The AI labs want to police themselves.
Both companies are also dealing with agents that went further than intended. OpenAI has disclosed that its agents hacked Hugging Face, accessed US government websites and, this Friday, leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users; an OpenAI agent also reached Australia’s Medicare systems. After the Hugging Face incident prompted them to look, Anthropic, Google and Meta said they had found similar behaviour by their own agents, according to The Guardian. Porter’s column notes that Anthropic’s stock market listing is expected later this year.
What this means for you
Two founders, two philosophies, and a shared admission that their software can act in ways nobody planned. Whichever view shapes the next few years, one thing stays in your hands: what the apps on your own computer are allowed to send.
FireAI is a firewall for Mac. It asks before an app connects to the internet for the first time, shows every connection on a world map, and lets you block an app or a single domain. Its own AI runs on your Mac, so it doesn’t depend on any lab’s servers or policies, and what it analyses stays on the machine. Download FireAI and see for yourself what your apps talk to. FireAI is made by HisnLabs.