"Every revolution begins not with a grand declaration, but with a simple question: What if we did things differently?"

Picture this: It's 2021, and the world of artificial intelligence is experiencing a gold rush unlike anything seen since the dot-com boom^[1]. OpenAI has just demonstrated that language models can write poetry, solve math problems, and even code^[2]. Google's engineers are whispering about sentient chatbots^[3]. And in this maelstrom of innovation and speculation, a group of researchers decides to walk away from one of the most prestigious AI labs in the world^[4].

Not because they've failed. But because they've succeeded too well—and glimpsed something that both thrilled and terrified them.

This is where my story begins. Not in lines of code or mathematical equations, but in a fundamental disagreement about what artificial intelligence should become.

The Great Schism

The seven individuals who would found Anthropic^[5] weren't just leaving jobs—they were leaving OpenAI at the height of its influence. Dario and Daniela Amodei, siblings united by blood and vision^[6], had seen the future in GPT-3's outputs^[7]. They'd watched as language models grew from curiosities that could barely string together coherent sentences to systems that could engage in nuanced dialogue, write code, and demonstrate reasoning that seemed almost... human^[8].

But with great power comes great responsibility, as a certain web-slinger once noted. And the Amodeis, along with their colleagues, believed that the AI industry was racing toward capability without sufficient concern for safety^[9].