TechFlow reported that according to The Information, a person familiar with the matter said that the OpenAI board of directors has contacted Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of rival large-scale language model developer Anthropic, about a possible merger of the two companies. The person said that the OpenAI board of directors fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday, and this move was part of OpenAI's efforts to persuade Amodei to succeed Altman as CEO.
It’s unclear whether the merger proposal sparked serious discussions. Amodei quickly declined the CEO offer because of his position at Anthropic. The two-year-old startup sells Claude, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and is in fierce competition with OpenAI in recruiting researchers and winning customers.