AI founder Sara Hooker argues Anthropic's launch strategy lacks humility, sparking debate over the company's public posture

Jobs was fired. Kalanick was fired. Engelbart was fired. It wouldn't be the first time.

In all cases it usually is stupid to do.

But investors aren't supporting him, at least in public.

My AI reads them all:

++++++

Good question — here's what the AI Investors list actually shows. The short answer: no prominent investor is publicly defending Dario. The investor community reaction ranges from measured silence to direct criticism. Here's the breakdown:

🔴 CRITICAL / NEGATIVE TOWARD DARIO

@arian_ghashghai (investor) — 26 likes, June 11 (before the shutdown): "imo its comical that it's virtually consensus at this point that the people running Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter) suck, while also being consensus that we should ape all of our savings into their stock. not really sure what that says about allocators"

@stevesi (Steve Sinofsky, former Microsoft Windows President, investor) — June 5: "Anthropic could always stop if they are so worried." This one is devastating. 11 likes but from a deeply credible source — a sharp jab at the safety theater argument.

@DavidSacks (David Sacks, Trump's AI Czar, investor) — March 28: RT'd: "Anthropic may pose as this company that's on the side of the angels, but they've hired a number of very s[uspicious people]..." Sacks has been hostile to Anthropic for months. He's also the person most likely to have been involved in the directive. His prior criticisms age in a particular way now.

@alexanderbittan (investor) — May 1: "Wild that Anthropic is the only major frontier lab not on the new DoW stack while literally everyone else OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SpaceX, Reflection just locked in classified deployments. This is what it looks like when leadership completely misreads the [room]"

🟡 NOTABLY SILENT / MEASURED

@htaneja (Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst CEO) — General Catalyst is a major Anthropic investor. His statement on Anthropic vs. Pentagon, April 21: "I cannot say the perspectives on either side were wrong. I think you need a culture where you can actually have conversations and create productive outcomes as opposed to taking very binary positions." This is not a defense of Dario. From the CEO of a major Anthropic investor, right when it mattered, that measured non-answer is significant.

@YasminRazavi (Spark Capital) — led Anthropic's $450M round when nobody else would. No public reaction found to the shutdown. Silent.

@bdeeter (Byron Deeter, Bessemer Venture Partners): Pre-shutdown positive: "We have not seen a company like this in the history of business." — But nothing since the shutdown.

🔵 WILD CARD: THE COST THEORY

@aviflombaum (in the AI Investors list, June 13): "I think the real reason @AnthropicAI stopped access to Fable 5 is because @kieranklaassen told me today at @blastoffrails that if he extrapolated his Fable 5 usage in the last week to API pricing for a year it would be $1,500,000."

This investor thinks the government story is a cover — the real reason is that Fable was too expensive to keep running for heavy users. $1.5M/year per power user makes the model economically unviable without massive pricing restructuring. The export control directive may have been welcomed as a convenient exit ramp.

BOTTOM LINE

No prominent AI investor has publicly defended Dario since the shutdown. The investor voices that have spoken are either critical of his leadership strategy, neutral, or offering business-case explanations that bypass the safety framing entirely. The General Catalyst CEO's measured non-defense from an Anthropic investor is perhaps the most telling data point — when your own investors don't come out swinging for you, the silence has a shape.

The closest thing to investor support: Yasmin Razavi and Byron Deeter had pre-shutdown positive statements, but neither has commented on the directive itself.

Want me to specifically pull the Bessemer or General Catalyst investor posts for more context?