A leaked internal memo from OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, Denise Dresser, has targeted the company’s chief rival Anthropic. Dresser, the former Slack CEO who recently took over former OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap’s commercial duties, wrote a 4-page memo to employees (via The Verge) where she directly attacked Anthropic’s business practices.
The memo arrives at a time when both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly gearing up for initial public offerings later this year. The two companies have been at loggerheads with each other on a variety of topics as well, with the amalgamation of that rivalry happening during the AI Impact Summit in India earlier this year, where the two CEOs refused to even hold hands.
OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic:
Anthropic’s rise in the AI coding segment has reportedly worried OpenAI, as the company narrowed its focus by shutting the Sora video generator while beginning development on a ChatGPT super app. However, in the latest memo, Dresser agreed that Anthropic’s coding focus gave them an ‘early wedge’ but noted that ‘you do not want to be a single-product company in a platform war’.
She also criticised Anthropic’s safety-first positioning, writing that their narrative is “built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI.”
“Our positive message will win over time: build powerful systems, put in the right safeguards, expand access, and help people do more,” Dresser said in the leaked memo as reported by The Verge.
OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer also took direct aim at Anthropic’s financials, claiming the competitor’s stated $30 billion revenue run rate is ‘artificially inflated’. She also alleged that Anthropic uses accounting treatments that make revenue look ‘bigger than it is’. Dresser alleged that Anthropic is inflating its numbers by roughly $8 billion.
Dresser also highlighted what she called a “strategic misstep” by Anthropic in not acquiring enough compute infrastructure. She argued this failure is now giving OpenAI a structural edge in the enterprise segment.
“Customers feel it through throttling, weaker availability, and a less reliable experience. We saw the exponential compute curve earlier, acted on it faster, and now have a real structural advantage,” Dresser argued.
Microsoft partnership a liability for OpenAI?
Dresser also shared that the company’s partnership with Microsoft has constrained the company’s enterprise growth.
“Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are,” Dresser wrote, pointing out that many large clients prefer to operate within Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Bedrock service.
However, Dresser noted that since announcing the partnership with Amazon in February, the demand for AWS integration has been “staggering.”
“Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering. We are firing on all cylinders to establish this as a scaled distribution channel,” she added.
