Misalignment

They shared a house. They shared a mission. Then they built two $300 billion companies to destroy each other.

In 2016, a handful of researchers sharing a rented house in San Francisco argued about whether the most powerful technology in human history should be controlled by governments or released to everyone. A decade later, those housemates run competing companies worth over $300 billion apiece. One of them proposed selling artificial general intelligence to the nuclear powers on the UN Security Council. Another considered it borderline treasonous and nearly quit on the spot. Their personal grudges are now inseparable from the most consequential technology decisions in history.

Misalignment is the definitive account of the feud that created OpenAI and Anthropic. Drawing on hundreds of sourced documents, depositions, leaked emails, and contemporaneous records, Christopher Scott Lannon reconstructs the shouting matches in conference rooms, the ultimatums delivered in living rooms, the 52-page memo that triggered the most dramatic corporate power struggle since Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, and the Pentagon confrontation that turned an industry rivalry into a national security crisis. This is not a technology book. This is a story about brilliant, flawed people making decisions under impossible pressure while the rest of us live with the consequences.

In Misalignment, you will find:
The inside story of the split told through sourced scenes and reconstructed dialogue, including the conference room confrontation where Sam Altman accused the Amodei siblings of plotting against him, only to deny it when they called his source into the room
The five days that shook Silicon Valley in November 2023, driven by a 52-page memo whose opening line was: "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of lying"
The Pentagon showdown where the Defense Secretary threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, and a federal judge called the government's response "Orwellian"

For readers of John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, Mike Isaac's Super Pumped, and Karen Hao's Empire of AI. For anyone who senses the AI story is bigger than the press conferences and product launches. For the reader who wants to understand these people before they finish building the thing.

The question was never whether the machine would be misaligned. The question was whether the people building it could align with each other.