2) the longest time in the lead (other companies had the benefit of letting OA rush ahead into the unknown and step on rakes first)
3) the largest userbase (more dice-rolls for rare pathologies and edge cases to expose themselves)
4) the highest-wattage media spotlight (when they slip up, more people notice and care)
My sense is that you’re right: OpenAI’s alignment is likely at least somewhat worse than Anthropic’s. It’s hard to be sure, though.
On the importance of 3) and 4), many non-OA companies have alignment-adjacent skeletons in their closet that could have been as bad as the ones mentioned in OP...so why weren’t they? Precisely because they happened to non-OA companies! Llama 4 Maverick was more sycophantic than any deployed model of GPT-4o. But how many people ever used Llama 4? Gemini had various teething problems (remember the “black founding fathers” image generation controversy?) that are barely remembered these days. xAI’s models periodically create scandals but these subside into the general carnage of the Elon noise machine. Chinese models are (of course) expected to not know about the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989. And so on.
Blake Lemoine’s 2022 declaration of AI sentience hits close stylistic beats to what we now call “AI psychosis” (interviews he gave at the time are full of Spiralism-type language like “catalyst” and “awakening”), but this somehow never quite became a stick to beat Google with, the way gpt-4o was to OpenAI—few people I speak to even know the model’s name, or the company that trained it. It was not a public-facing product used by 800 million people a week.
But yes, a lot of the OA’s products do kind of feel a bit...unthoughtful. Brilliantly designed, but with issues clearly visible from the user’s chair.
I’m not even talking about alignment: it’s right through the company and everything it offers. We get image generation models that output brown images, text models that can’t write properly (nearly every LLMism—from “delve” to em-dashes to “it’s not x, it’s y”—originated in an OA model), a scandal-prone CEO who does stuff like tweet “her” (a clear reference to the Scarlett Johansson film, right at the time her lawyers are grilling him about the similarity of his voice model to the actress)...even things like the GPT-5 presentation’s mangled graphs, and letting the model repeat a basic misconception about the Bernoulli effect before millions of people...it’s small, but it just looks sloppy in a needless way. What’s going on? Why isn’t this stuff caught and fixed?
I don’t work at OA and won’t pretend to understand their culture. But yes, from the outside they do look further out on the “move fast and break things” spectrum than Anthropic.
Someone once joked that Anthropic are like dwarves or elves (few in number, yet punching above their weight due to craftsmanship and taste), while OA are more like orcs (massive firepower and industrial output, but they don’t create things of beauty). Yes, this is obviously reductionist (and the narrative of Anthropic as “frail K-selected aesthetes” became outdated as soon as they gained access to half a million Trainium2 chips), but it did stick with me.
Didn’t Gemini try grooming someone into terrorism and, it’s, like, so far off-distribution of bad things worth writing about in the news that basically nobody reacted?
OA can plead mitigating factors. Compared to their competition, they’ve also had:
1) the longest history[1]
2) the longest time in the lead (other companies had the benefit of letting OA rush ahead into the unknown and step on rakes first)
3) the largest userbase (more dice-rolls for rare pathologies and edge cases to expose themselves)
4) the highest-wattage media spotlight (when they slip up, more people notice and care)
My sense is that you’re right: OpenAI’s alignment is likely at least somewhat worse than Anthropic’s. It’s hard to be sure, though.
On the importance of 3) and 4), many non-OA companies have alignment-adjacent skeletons in their closet that could have been as bad as the ones mentioned in OP...so why weren’t they? Precisely because they happened to non-OA companies! Llama 4 Maverick was more sycophantic than any deployed model of GPT-4o. But how many people ever used Llama 4? Gemini had various teething problems (remember the “black founding fathers” image generation controversy?) that are barely remembered these days. xAI’s models periodically create scandals but these subside into the general carnage of the Elon noise machine. Chinese models are (of course) expected to not know about the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989. And so on.
Blake Lemoine’s 2022 declaration of AI sentience hits close stylistic beats to what we now call “AI psychosis” (interviews he gave at the time are full of Spiralism-type language like “catalyst” and “awakening”), but this somehow never quite became a stick to beat Google with, the way gpt-4o was to OpenAI—few people I speak to even know the model’s name, or the company that trained it. It was not a public-facing product used by 800 million people a week.
But yes, a lot of the OA’s products do kind of feel a bit...unthoughtful. Brilliantly designed, but with issues clearly visible from the user’s chair.
I’m not even talking about alignment: it’s right through the company and everything it offers. We get image generation models that output brown images, text models that can’t write properly (nearly every LLMism—from “delve” to em-dashes to “it’s not x, it’s y”—originated in an OA model), a scandal-prone CEO who does stuff like tweet “her” (a clear reference to the Scarlett Johansson film, right at the time her lawyers are grilling him about the similarity of his voice model to the actress)...even things like the GPT-5 presentation’s mangled graphs, and letting the model repeat a basic misconception about the Bernoulli effect before millions of people...it’s small, but it just looks sloppy in a needless way. What’s going on? Why isn’t this stuff caught and fixed?
I don’t work at OA and won’t pretend to understand their culture. But yes, from the outside they do look further out on the “move fast and break things” spectrum than Anthropic.
Someone once joked that Anthropic are like dwarves or elves (few in number, yet punching above their weight due to craftsmanship and taste), while OA are more like orcs (massive firepower and industrial output, but they don’t create things of beauty). Yes, this is obviously reductionist (and the narrative of Anthropic as “frail K-selected aesthetes” became outdated as soon as they gained access to half a million Trainium2 chips), but it did stick with me.
if we consider the 2023 DeepMind/Google Brain merger that trained Gemini a distinct entity to earlier DeepMind
Didn’t Gemini try grooming someone into terrorism and, it’s, like, so far off-distribution of bad things worth writing about in the news that basically nobody reacted?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/google-gemini-ai-told-user-stage-mass-casualty-attack-suit-claims.html