Amodei: Anthropic withheld Claude 1 before ChatGPT to delay AI arms race
Dario Amodei · The AI Tsunami is Here & Society Isn't Ready | Dario Amodei x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF · Nikhil Kamath · Feb 24, 2026 · at 29:30
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explains to Nikhil Kamath why Anthropic deliberately delayed launching Claude 1 in 2022 prior to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
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“So back in 2022 you know, we had an early version of Claude, Claude one. This was before ChatGPT. And we chose not to release this because we were worried that it would kick off an arms race and not give us enough time to, you know, to build these systems safely, right? It was kind of a one-time overhang, like, we could see the power of the models, a couple other companies could see the power of the models, and so we didn't, you know, we decided not to do that, and that's public, that's well documented, and, you know, and then we waited until someone else did, and then we're like, okay, the arms race has kicked off, so You know, now, now, now we can Release our model, but probably the world gained a few months. Now, that was very commercially expensive. We probably, you know, seeded the lead on, you know, consumer AI because of that.”
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