For years technology has been defined by the unstoppable growth of a handful of companies. Big Tech’s consolidation of power seemed a foregone conclusion even as Sam Altman’s OpenAI sparked an artificial intelligence boom with ChatGPT. Having promised to build AI for humanity, Altman became a proxy for Microsoft Corp., just as his rival in the race to construct utopia, Demis Hassabis, now ships product for Google.

But the last two months of market upheaval — and standoffs with the Pentagon over how this tech might be militarized — have shown a company breaking that mold. Anthropic PBC has no single Big Tech backer it can call a proxy (not yet anyway) and it has shunned the Silicon Valley “blitzscaling” mantra of shipping fast to dominate a market and patch problems on the fly. Its Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has said “no” to many of the things Altman rushed into.

© Bloomberg