Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has opened up about why he left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic—and it comes down to two things: scaling laws and safety. Speaking on Nikhil Kamath's podcast WTF Is, Amodei said he saw the potential of scaling AI models as early as 2019 with GPT-2, while most colleagues remained skeptical.

He also said he wasn't convinced OpenAI had a genuine commitment to building AI responsibly—so he left to do it his way.