According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI’s board of directors approached rival Anthropic’s CEO about replacing Sam Altman and potentially merging the two AI startups. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declined on both fronts. Reuters reports: The news, reported earlier by The Information on Monday, follows various reported calls to find Altman’s successor days after OpenAI’s board ousted him. […] The co-founders of Anthropic, who were also executives at OpenAI until 2020, had broken from their employer over disagreements regarding how to ensure AI’s safe development and governance. Anthropic has won investments from Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com. Its Claude AI models have vied for prominence with OpenAI’s GPT series.