Inside Anthropic, OpenAI and Google’s Secret AI Standards Talks, Anthropic’s $13.7B Compute Deal

Akash Pasricha (0:13)

Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, September 14th. We have a ton of coverage for you today on Dario Amodei's explosive essay over the weekend. Many of the big AI labs have all chimed in, and markets are moving. Before we get to it, I want to remind you that The Information is launching a new weekly show, AI Deep Dive, today, hosted by my colleague Rocket Drew. The first episode is going to be live at noon Pacific 3 p.m. Eastern. It is Rocket's conversation with OpenAI researcher Gnome Brown. You do not want to miss that. Today on this show, we're going to be talking about our exclusive reporting on what is going on behind the scenes of all of these pacing the frontier AI research essays that have been swirling around. We also have reporting on how worried Anthropic and OpenAI customers are about the labs using their IP.

We have a scoop for you on a multi-billion dollar compute deal that Anthropic has signed. To wrap the show, I'm bringing on the CEOs of Superhuman and Rillet for their thoughts on this crazy news cycle that we're in. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.

It was a busy weekend in Silicon Valley, as yet another essay from Dario Amodei drew attention from all the big players in AI. The Anthropic CEO called for the AI industry to moderate the speed at which it develops cutting edge tools. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Asabas all largely agreed with him.

Of course, it is important in these moments to talk not just about what leaders are saying, but also what they are doing behind the scenes. And that is why new exclusive reporting from our tech and politics reporter Leo Schwartz is so important right now in this moment. Leo caught wind of some of the conversations that are happening behind closed doors. And I want to bring on Leo to share more about what he found. Leo, what a weekend. What a weekend indeed.

Leo Schwartz (2:10)

Not quiet.

Akash Pasricha (2:13)

So I want to get to Dario's essay in a minute here. We'll unpack it all and get your thoughts on it. But what are you hearing is going on behind closed doors right now in these boardrooms?

Leo Schwartz (2:25)

I think you have to wind the clock back a bit to July. That's when Demis Isavis, then CEO of Google DeepMind, published his own proposal, basically calling for a self-regulatory organization, a standards body among AI companies that would be lightly overseen by the government, similar to FINRA, the financial SRO.

What we reported is that after that proposal came out, there were actually behind the scenes talks, a working group below the CEO level between the three big labs. That would be DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI that continued for weeks. If you remember, a few weeks ago, I had reporting that there had actually been an executive order draft for this type of proposal that would create an SRO that stalled in the White House. Then of course, you had yesterday's essay from Dario, which did mention the standards body among other proposals. Our reporting showed that these discussions between the three large AI labs had been continuing with the discussion as recent as this past week about the idea of a standards body, and that bubbled up into Dario's essay.

Akash Pasricha (3:33)

So who exactly is in these meetings? Do we have any idea?

Leo Schwartz (3:38)

We don't have specifics, but it's a working group, so it would be people working on policy at the three companies, not the CEO, so it wasn't Dario, Sam and Demis, but leaders at the three companies working on these ideas.

Akash Pasricha (3:52)

And what do we know about what has sort of materialized in these discussions? I mean, how far have they gotten? Have there been drafts of, you know, soft rules that, you know, could have bubbled up into Dario's essays?

Leo Schwartz (4:06)

Yeah, well, so clearly there was progress enough that they had convinced the White House enough to have an executive order draft, at least. No installed, as we reported earlier, but the talks continued. And the idea, as I reported, is that you could actually do this, not necessarily with the government, but have your own SRO without the government. This sort of famously was raised by David Sacks, the former AI czar, in a tweet a few weeks ago, where he said he didn't want to have a FINRA type model. He wanted to have something more modeled after the Motion Picture Association, which was created entirely without the government. So even after this idea stalled in the White House, and there wasn't government support, the three labs continued discussions about a standards body.