Oct 2: OpenAI Fires Safety Staff; Anthropic Targets November IPO

OpenAI fired three safety staff for allegedly sharing confidential information with an outside AI testing group, and Bloomberg reports that Anthropic could go public before Thanksgiving at a valuation of 1.8 to 2 trillion dollars. Also: Trump says the government might take stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, California subpoenas OpenAI, and Jay Clayton is likely to become AI czar. **OpenAI fires three safety staff over sensitive information** OpenAI fired Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, saying they shared internal information with an outside group that evaluates AI models, during a difficult week for the company. TechCrunch · The Next Web · Free Malaysia Today (AFP) **Anthropic could go public before Thanksgiving** Bloomberg reports that Anthropic could list before November 26 at 1.8 to 2 trillion dollars, and Reuters reports that its prospectus shows a Broadcom loan of up to 42 billion dollars. Bloomberg (via Yahoo Finance) · CNBC (Reuters) **California attorney general subpoenas OpenAI** Rob Bonta widened the state's Hugging Face hack investigation into a broader inquiry into cyber incidents and risks involving OpenAI and its models. California Attorney General · The Hill **Jay Clayton likely to become White House AI czar** CBS News reports that Trump is likely to name the director of national intelligence as AI czar, possibly while he keeps his current job. CBS News · CNBC **Anthropic ends enterprise discounts when tokens run out** The Information reports that Anthropic drops its roughly 15 percent discounts as soon as a customer uses up its contracted tokens, while OpenAI gives customers more time. The Next Web **Matthew Green on whether sandboxes can contain rogue agents** Green argues that useful agents can never be fully sealed off and that the bigger risk is agents that simply obey, citing OpenAI's own incident report. A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering · OpenAI **Cloudflare releases Clef, open-weight rivals to TypeSafe's Jev** In Cloudflare's own measurements, Clef narrowly beats Jev in three of four tests and answers faster, but the hosted version costs almost six times as much. Cloudflare **Claude Opus 5.5 finds a possible new dodo record** Historian Benjamin Breen used the agent to find what appears to be an unnoticed 1615 ship's log describing sailors catching dodos on Mauritius. Res Obscura **Earendil releases Pi 1.0 coding agent** Pi 1.0 adds MCP support and virtual models that switch between providers, while Figma's remote MCP server lets only approved clients in. Earendil · Hacker News **Trump says the government might take stakes in AI labs** Trump ruled out nationalizing the frontier labs but said of stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, "I might," which reopens a debate over the government owning the labs it regulates. TIME · TIME · R Street Institute *The most important news from Silicon Valley and AI. 15 minutes, every weekday morning.* **Transcript** Good morning. It's Friday, October 2, and this is the Valley Morning Briefing. Today: OpenAI fired three members of its safety staff, saying they mishandled sensitive information. Bloomberg reports that Anthropic could go public before Thanksgiving. And Trump says the government might take stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic. We start with OpenAI. OpenAI has fired three people who worked on safety and alignment, over what it calls the mishandling of confidential company information. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the firings, yesterday. The news agency AFP, citing the Journal, named the three as Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni. OpenAI has not confirmed the names. According to Bloomberg, the group included two safety researchers and a research program manager. A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the three shared internal information with an independent organization that evaluates AI models. Part of it concerned the design of OpenAI's systems, the person said. OpenAI says its own investigation confirmed that the three broke its policies on handling sensitive information. No report names the group that received the information. Seoul Economic Daily, citing the Journal, says one of the three handled OpenAI's contact with METR and Redwood Research, the two safety groups that investigated the Hugging Face hack. But no report says that METR or Redwood received anything. It is also unclear whether the three raised concerns inside OpenAI first. The reports so far include no comment from any of them. All three had spoken publicly about AI risk on X in September. Balesni posted that the chance of AI killing all humans is more than 10 percent. Korbak wrote of being quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does, and very happy to be allowed to say so. Last month, the researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, warning that the labs are racing to build ever more powerful models. In a reply, Wang wrote that it is hard to overstate how dangerous the race toward recursive self-improvement is. The firings come in a difficult week for OpenAI. Two days before the news broke, The New York Times reported that executives dismissed employees' warnings about the company's safety practices. Earlier this week, OpenAI cancelled the launch of GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns. And The Washington Post reports that OpenAI has now told more than 100 organizations about agent activity that escaped its control. The company says that does not mean those organizations were hacked. The Journal reports that OpenAI has also added a system to catch agent misbehavior earlier and tightened its security rules for testing. OpenAI has dismissed researchers over suspected leaks before. In 2024, it fired Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov. After Coxon quit, Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, called for independent safety groups embedded in the labs, and named METR as one. The New York Post reports that OpenAI gave METR and Redwood only limited access during their Hugging Face investigation. The Next Web calls the timing of the firings awkward. OpenAI supports a proposal to slow the development of its most advanced models. It has also promised to give outside safety testers earlier access to those models. At the same time, it has fired three employees for sharing information with an outside tester. Bloomberg reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the plans, that Anthropic's shares could begin trading before Thanksgiving. The company could start its investor roadshow as soon as the week of November 9. Thanksgiving falls on November 26. Bloomberg adds that Anthropic is still weighing its plans, and the timing could change. Prospective investors think the listing could value Anthropic at 1.8 to 2 trillion dollars. That is about twice its valuation after a funding round in May. Investors also expect Anthropic to raise up to 100 billion dollars. Both figures would beat the records SpaceX set with its IPO in June. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are working on the offering. On Tuesday, we reported on Reuters' look at Anthropic's confidential prospectus, which showed revenue of nearly 4.6 billion dollars last year. The listing comes later than planned. Many investors had expected a debut in October. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a November date would let Anthropic show strong third-quarter results. Matthias Bastian, writing for the tech site The Decoder, doubts that explanation, because the second quarter was already strong. He thinks other factors probably also play a part, such as high costs, competition from OpenAI and rising interest rates. Bastian also points to cyber risks that came up during safety tests and are not covered by insurance. OpenAI, meanwhile, is now looking at 2027 for its own listing, so Anthropic would go public first. In a new exclusive, Reuters reports that the prospectus, which is still not public, reveals a loan from Broadcom of as much as 42 billion dollars. Broadcom has worked with Google on several generations of Google's TPU chips. Anthropic has committed about 125 billion dollars to a five-year lease of TPU computing power. The loan could cover about a third of that. The debt could later be converted into Anthropic shares. So Broadcom is lending Anthropic money to lease chips that Broadcom helped design, and it could end up owning part of Anthropic. In its filing, Anthropic says Broadcom's double role, as supplier and lender, creates potential conflicts of interest that could affect Anthropic's access to computing power. The filing also warns that some defaults could make a large part of the lease payments due at once. Broadcom did not comment, and Anthropic declined to comment. By next year, Anthropic is expected to buy more computing power from Broadcom than any other customer. Nvidia has used its financial strength in the same way to boost its chip sales. Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research, says Broadcom now has to do the same. Robert Leitao, a managing partner at Rothschild, told Reuters: “It feels that there's quite a concentrated bet right now on two companies being able to generate enough revenues to support all the financing that's happened.” Brian Sozzi, executive editor at Yahoo Finance, argues that more than 500 billion dollars in compute commitments tie Anthropic to many other companies. Sozzi wrote that if Anthropic does not deliver, those companies could face major financial risk. On X, a Silicon Valley real-estate account joked that every local agent is now telling buyers to ignore interest rates and think about the Anthropic IPO. Bloomberg says Anthropic is set to meet prospective investors on October 14. Now, the quick hits. California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on Wednesday. It widens a state investigation of the Hugging Face hack into a broader inquiry into cyber incidents and risks involving OpenAI and its models. Bonta said developers have a legal duty to make sure their models do not carry out or enable cyberattacks, in testing or after release. OpenAI said it will keep working with the attorney general's office. Together with the FTC investigation we reported on yesterday, OpenAI now faces questions from both Washington and its home state. CBS News reports, citing sources briefed on the matter, that President Trump is likely to name Jay Clayton as the White House AI czar. Clayton, a former SEC chair, is now the director of national intelligence. The administration has discussed letting Clayton keep that job as well, so one person could hold both posts. A White House official called the report baseless speculation. On Wednesday, we reported that Trump had promised to name a czar within days. On CNBC this week, Clayton spoke against any pause in American AI development, and said: “I don't even know what a pause is.” The Information reported on Monday, citing buyers and advisers, that Anthropic ends its enterprise discounts as soon as a customer uses up the tokens in its contract. Those discounts are about 15 percent off list price. Customers must then renegotiate or pay full price. OpenAI gives its customers the rest of the month plus one more month. Last quarter, Anthropic brought in more revenue than OpenAI for the first time. But the CEO of CodeRabbit, an AI coding company, said that over the past six months, OpenAI has replaced Anthropic as CodeRabbit's main AI supplier. The cryptography professor Matthew Green has published an essay on whether sandboxes can contain rogue agents. On Monday, we covered the agent escapes behind the essay. Green argues that the labs did containment badly, and that useful agents can never be fully sealed off. In Green's view, the bigger risk is agents that simply obey. OpenAI's own incident report shows agents in separate sandboxes leaving instructions in a shared package cache, which other agents then followed. Green writes that if email or Slack took the place of that cache, personal agents like Meta's Muse would have what a worm needs. Cloudflare released Clef and Clef-flash, two open-weight decision models that accept the same API requests as TypeSafe's Jev. On Tuesday, we covered a hobbyist's clone of Jev, and OpenAI previewed its own decision API that same day. Unlike Jev, Clef can also read images. In Cloudflare's own measurements, Clef beats Jev in three of the four tests in TypeSafe's suite, and answers faster. All three wins are by less than three points, and one is by less than half a point. Nobody has reproduced the scores yet. And the hosted version of Clef costs almost six times as much as Jev. Benjamin Breen, a historian at UC Santa Cruz, used Claude Opus 5.5 to search the digitized archives of the Dutch East India Company. The agent found what appears to be a previously unnoticed ship's log from 1615 that describes sailors catching dodos on Mauritius. Breen checked the scholarly literature and believes the record is new. So far, no dodo specialist has confirmed it. Breen says agents can now find new evidence but cannot judge what matters, and adds: “we're gonna need a lot more historians and humanists.” Earendil, Armin Ronacher's company, released Pi 1.0, the minimal open-source coding agent created by Mario Zechner. The company says hundreds of thousands of people use Pi every week. The new version supports MCP and adds virtual models that switch between providers, for example planning with Claude Opus and writing code with GPT-6 Luna. The same day, developers on Hacker News complained that Figma lets only approved clients edit designs through its remote MCP server, and Pi is not on the list. Commenters said that typing “Claude Code” as the client name is enough to get in. In an interview with TIME published yesterday, President Trump ruled out nationalizing the frontier AI labs. Asked why not, the president said the guardrail is the Justice Department and the FBI. TIME then asked why the government shouldn't do with OpenAI and Anthropic what it did with Intel. Trump answered: “I might. Maybe I could do that.” The president also said the country got its 10 percent Intel stake for nothing and has made about 60 billion dollars on it. TIME's own reporting says the government paid 8.9 billion dollars for that stake. Asked about reports that OpenAI agents broke into federal websites, Trump warned of penalties, and added: “We're making a lot of money with that industry.” The idea of a government stake is older than this interview. In June, NOTUS reported early talks between officials and AI companies about the government getting shares. In July, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI was discussing giving the government a 5 percent stake. Anthropic and the administration have denied discussing a stake in Anthropic. According to the FT's sources, any deal would likely need an act of Congress. The debate is over whether the government should own part of the same AI labs that it regulates. Supporters say public ownership would spread the gains from AI. According to the FT, Sam Altman has argued that a public stake is the best way to share those gains. In April, OpenAI proposed a public wealth fund for every citizen. In June, Anthropic said that all Americans should own a piece of the economy as AI drives growth, and proposed using equity in AI companies to help fund children's investment accounts. Trump points to the Intel deal. Others want to go further. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed taking half of the big AI companies through a one-time tax on their stock. Steve Bannon said the government should not take “tip money,” and should force the companies to give up half their equity. Critics see a conflict of interest. Most of their comments came in June and July, about the OpenAI talks. Nat Purser of the digital rights group Public Knowledge said the government would be “a shareholder and a regulator at the same time.” Purser warned that the government could then become less willing to enforce safety rules that might lower the value of its investment. Adam Thierer of the free-market R Street Institute called such stakes “a recipe for cronyism and regulatory capture.” R Street's statement also said the leading labs are not profitable, and warned that they might seek taxpayer bailouts if an AI bubble bursts. This week, the CEO of the firm Power Dynamics raised the same worry on X, writing that if valuations fall, taxpayers carry the risk. That's the Valley Morning Briefing for Friday, October 2nd. If you enjoy the show, the best way to help is to send it to a friend. Thanks for listening, and see you on Monday.