{"id":427268,"date":"2026-01-24T15:17:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T15:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/427268\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T15:17:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T15:17:29","slug":"ai-labs-wage-a-reputational-knife-fight-at-davos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/427268\/","title":{"rendered":"AI labs wage a reputational knife fight at Davos"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/p>\n

The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a presidential primary.<\/p>\n

I helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday, I asked<\/a> Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about OpenAI\u2019s decision to test ads in ChatGPT. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting they\u2019ve gone for that so early,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe they feel they need to make more revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei piled it on during an interview I watched at The Wall Street Journal House in Davos. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to monetize a billion free users because we\u2019re in some death race with some other large player,\u201d he said. He also teased an upcoming essay focused on the \u201cbad things\u201d AI could bring \u2014 a dark counterpart to his optimistic \u201cMachines of Loving Grace\u201d essay<\/a> from last year. During another Davos appearance, he compared the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to China to \u201cselling nuclear weapons to North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t need to monetize a billion free users because we\u2019re in some death race with some other large player.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s retort came from Chris Lehane, its head of policy and perhaps the most formidable political operator in Silicon Valley. Lehane earned the nickname \u201cmaster of disaster\u201d in the Clinton White House, where he specialized in opposition research and crisis management. At Airbnb, he helped the company survive regulatory battles that threatened its existence. Now he\u2019s the most high-profile policy chief of any AI lab and is applying tactics from his campaigning days to the AI race.<\/p>\n

When I sat down with Lehane for breakfast on Thursday morning near the main Promenade in Davos, he was ready to punch back. In response to Hassabis\u2019 ad comments, Lehane pointed to the obvious irony. \u201cYou do have to pay for compute if you\u2019re going to give people access,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m happy to have that conversation with the biggest online advertising platform in the world every day, seven days a week.\u201d He also called Amodei\u2019s comments \u201celitist\u201d and \u201cundemocratic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll often have someone who is trying to move up from the second tier say things that are provocative, because it creates a feedback loop,\u201d he told me between bites of scrambled eggs. \u201cThat gets you some attention. My experience in politics is that it often ends up being short-lived because ultimately, if you\u2019re saying these things, people are going to hold you accountable to your actual solutions. If we\u2019re going to lose a big chunk of jobs [to AI], what are you actually doing to address it, particularly if you\u2019re raising these questions, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people making those critiques are often not focused on how to make this technology broadly accessible,\u201d he continued. \u201cThey tend to come from a background that focuses almost exclusively on enterprise use cases. That\u2019s a very elitist approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll often have someone who is trying to move up from the second tier say things that are provocative, because it creates a feedback loop. That gets you some attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reality is much more nuanced than these jabs the AI labs are making at each other. OpenAI is aggressively trying to take Anthropic\u2019s enterprise AI business, as is Google. And while it\u2019s true that ChatGPT is the most widely used chatbot, recasting its ad push as being part of some sort of democratic virtue, and not a financially motivated move to finally monetize most of ChatGPT\u2019s usage, is a nice bit of spin.<\/p>\n

During our conversation, Lehane kept returning to his political framing. Being at Davos, he told me, felt \u201ca little bit like walking downtown\u201d in Manchester, New Hampshire, before a primary race: the weather, the signs everywhere, and the campaigns descending into one compressed environment, all trying to get attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the front-runner status,\u201d Lehane said. \u201cEven if the front-runner started off as a dark horse, we\u2019ve now established ourselves on the basis of our innovation. And the others are all trying to position off of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After my conversations with AI leaders this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to gang up on OpenAI. Hassabis and Amodei praised each other onstage during an official WEF panel this week titled \u201cThe Day After AGI.\u201c<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI think the thing we actually have in common is that both companies that are led by researchers who focus on the models, who focus on solving important problems in the world,\u201d Amodei said during the panel. \u201cI think those are the kind of companies that are going to succeed going forward, and I think we share that between us very much.\u201d (Sam Altman skipped Davos this year and is reportedly<\/a> in the Middle East raising tens of billions more dollars.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, OpenAI\u2019s rivals have told me they\u2019re particularly annoyed by Altman\u2019s aggressive attempts to shore up AI capacity, and some are frustrated at getting boxed out of deals by an unprofitable company that hasn\u2019t yet shown it has the revenue to pay for the eye-popping commitments it\u2019s making.<\/p>\n

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and the race to AGI accelerating, I expect the rhetoric to get more heated this year. Lehane told me campaigns get nastier as Election Day approaches. If he\u2019s right about the analogy, we\u2019re still in the early primaries.<\/p>\n

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