OpenAI’s board of directors has reportedly approached Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, to discuss the possibility of replacing their current CEO, Sam Altman, and merging the two AI startups. However, Amodei declined both proposals, as reported by The Information on Monday. According to a report by REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration dated March 31, 2023, Anthropic’s logo is visible in the illustration.

OpenAI has since offered ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear the position of interim chief for which he accepted. Meanwhile, Microsoft has taken on Altman and other key OpenAI personnel as employees. This move has caused unrest in OpenAI with nearly all of its 700 employees threatening to quit and one of its four-person board members already resigning.

The co-founders of Anthropic, who were also former executives at OpenAI, split from their previous employer in 2020 due to disagreements over the safe development and governance of AI. Anthropic has secured investments from Google and Amazon and has seen its Claude AI models gain prominence alongside OpenAI’s GPT series. The report was edited by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Sam Holmes with reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru.