AI CEOs are openly trash-talking each other, sniping over advertising and their philosophical approaches to the future.
Why it matters: The squabbling is intensifying as the cost of staying competitive in AI soars — and pressure is mounting for the technology to deliver real returns.
Driving the news: The fighting ramped up around the Super Bowl.
- Anthropic pledged to keep its large language model, Claude, ad-free, alongside a commercial poking at OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired back with a lengthy post on X, calling the ad "dishonest."
- Altman was already fending off rumors about OpenAI's relationship with Nvidia, after the Wall Street Journal reported the chipmaker was pulling back from a proposed $100 billion investment. Reuters' sources said OpenAI has been exploring alternatives to Nvidia's chips.
Between the lines: "What a huge coincidence that after Nvidia hurt OpenAI's feelings, OpenAI hurt Nvidia's feelings back ... high-school level behavior," Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Axios.
- Altman also has beef with Elon Musk, the xAI founder behind the Grok chatbot and a co-founder of OpenAI.
- Musk is currently pursuing two separate lawsuits against Altman — for abandoning OpenAI's original nonprofit business model and for monopolizing markets.
- The two openly jab at each other online and in interviews.
The big picture: AI CEOs can be roughly divided into two groups: the researchers and the entrepreneurs.
- The researchers tend to view AI as a fragile, long-term project that demands collaboration, caution and governance.
- The entrepreneurs want to move fast and break things.
Zoom in: Google DeepMind is seen as a research-first AI lab, earning early notoriety for AlphaFold, which transformed how scientists understand the building blocks encoded by DNA.
- Altman and Musk come from startup and engineering worlds, emphasizing speed and scale rather than scientific consensus. (Musk argues AI deployment should slow down unless, of course, he's the one in charge.)
Yes, but: Free market enthusiasts say this kind of trash-talking is healthy for the economy.
- "The reason we've done so well as a society for almost 250 years is competition," Luria said.
What we're watching: Ultimately, the outcome of the AI race might be less dependent on the CEO and more dependent on the AI itself.
- Both Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have said that AI will eventually be able to do a better job leading companies than they do.
- AI is already pretty good at trash talking humans — as Moltbook showed.
The bottom line: The AI buildout is not just a capitalism contest among its CEOs.
- It's a clash of belief systems — with markets, technology and far more riding on the outcome.
