‘Do more with less’: Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei outlines strategy to compete with OpenAI

Amid the high-stakes AI race, Anthropic has said it is pursuing a different path by focusing on doing more with less rather than simply outspending rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

The AI startup behind Claude said it is prioritising disciplined spending, algorithmic efficiency, and smarter deployment of AI models as a way to get ahead in the AI race.

“Anthropic has always had a fraction of what our competitors have had in terms of compute and capital, and yet, pretty consistently, we’ve had the most powerful, most performant models for the majority of the past several years,” Daniela Amodei, the president and co-founder of Anthropic, was quoted as saying by CNBC in a recent interview.

“I think what we have always aimed to do at Anthropic is be as judicious with the resources that we have while still operating in this space where it’s just a lot of compute,” Amodei added.

Anthropic’s governing principle of ‘do more with less’ is in stark contrast to the widely held belief among Silicon Valley firms that the key to winning the AI race involves raising record sums, securing chip deals years in advance, and building data centres across the world. OpenAI has emerged as the clearest embodiment of this approach, with the ChatGPT maker committing an estimated total of $1.4 trillion in securing next-generation chips, building massive data center campuses, and undertaking other AI infrastructure projects.

However, many have questioned the strategy of improving model quality by increasing compute, data, model size, and capabilities.

Last year, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek took a frugal approach to AI development and triggered a market reaction after claiming that its open-weight AI model performed on par or better than cutting-edge AI models while using fewer resources. In response to investor concerns that DeepSeek’s breakthrough would lead to a reduced demand of Nvidia’s GPUs, tech industry leaders had argued that it could counterintuitively, increase demand for advanced chips. “Jevons paradox strikes again!” Satya Nadella had posted on X.

Anthropic’s competitive edge in the fierce AI race could be defined as an enterprise-first model provider since much of the startup’s revenue comes from other companies paying to integrate its Claude, Sonnet, and Opus series of models into workflows, products, and internal systems. Claude Code, launched in June 2025, has quickly become one of the most popular command-line programming tools.

Anthropic co-founders, Daniela Amodei and her brother, Dario Amodei, who is also the startup’s CEO, shared the worldview that scaling AI models is the way forward. But now, Anthropic is looking to move away from this logic and lean into higher-quality training data, advanced post-training techniques, and better product choices designed to make models cheaper to run and easier to adopt.

“A lot of the numbers that are thrown around are sort of not exactly apples to apples, because of just how the structure of some of these deals are kind of set up,” Daniela Amodei said.

“We have continued to be surprised, even as the people who pioneered this belief in scaling laws. Something that I hear from my colleagues a lot is, the exponential continues until it doesn’t. And every year we’ve been like, ‘Well, this can’t possibly be the case that things will continue on the exponential’ — and then every year it has,” she further said.

Anthropic’s compute requirements are also expected to keep rising. “The compute requirements for the future are very large. So our expectation is, yes, we will need more compute to be able to just stay at the frontier as we get bigger,” she said. She further argued that AI model progress is not slowing down, adding that there is an important distinction between the technology curve and economic curve.

“Regardless of how good the technology is, it takes time for that to be used in a business or sort of personal context. The real question to me is: How quickly can businesses in particular, but also individuals, leverage the technology?” Amodei said.