As SoftBank Group Corp. began investing billions of dollars in OpenAI last year, some executives asked Masayoshi Son what would happen in the event — however unlikely — that the ChatGPT developer should fail. Son, who has said he believes Sam Altman is leading this century’s most vital technology shift, dismissed such questions on multiple occasions, often so brusquely that his lieutenants stopped bringing them up, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Yet recent breakthroughs by rival Anthropic PBC have raised doubts in financial markets about the business co-founded by Altman, just as it prepares to go public as early as this ...