Sam Altman tears into Anthropic’s latest AI safety ad: ‘Thought this was satire’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has attacked Anthropic over a new ad from the Claude maker, which he said looked like “satire”. The new attack by Altman comes amid the OpenAI chief’s ongoing feud with Elon Musk and the recent lawsuit filed by Apple over the alleged theft of confidential trade secrets.

“There’s hope in hard questions,” Anthropic wrote in a post on X that contained a video featuring what appeared to be random images and posing questions about AI safety.

Some of the questions in the video included, “Can AI be trusted?” and “If it ends up taking almost all the jobs, then what does it mean to work?”

Altman responded to the video, writing, “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something”.

“hard questions are great but only if we deem you worthy enough to not silently downgrade you, or even get access at all,” he added.

In a separate post on X that seemed to be aimed at OpenAI’s rivals, Altman wrote, “come for the best model, stay because we don’t treat you with contempt”.

Notably, this is not the first time that tensions have flared between OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, Anthropic was set up by former OpenAI employees Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei.

The sourness in the relationship between the two companies was on full display during the AI Impact Summit held in India earlier this year as well, when Amodei and Altman refused to hold hands during the “unity hand-raise” initiated by PM Modi.

Meanwhile, Anthropic had also targeted OpenAI with a series of Super Bowl ads earlier this year, which criticised OpenAI’s reported plans to bring ads to cheaper Go tier and free users. Anthropic, in response, vowed to keep Claude completely ad-free.

“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” read one commercial by Anthropic.

Altman went on to call the ads funny but “deceptive”.

“I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it,” the OpenAI chief wrote at the time.

Recently, OpenAI released its latest GPT-5.6 series of models, which it claimed even surpasses the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model, widely considered to be the most powerful AI model at the time.

Sam Altman and Elon Musk battle

After the GPT-5.6 launch, Altman also found himself in a renewed public spat with Musk, who once again referred to the OpenAI chief as “Scam Altman.”

Meanwhile, Altman described it as a sign that ChatGPT was heading in the right direction that Musk was “obsessed” with him once again. He also accused Musk of deceiving public market investors with claims of starting AI datacentres in space.

Musk responded by bringing up the new lawsuit filed by Apple and claimed that OpenAI stole Apple’s phone technology.

“After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow. What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat,” Musk wrote.