Meet the Sydneysider brokering peace talks between Anthropic and OpenAI
From a skunkworks experiment inside Block to a 130-company coalition including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft: how Sydney's Manik Surtani brokered a truce to keep agentic AI open.
Manik Surtani has a warning about artificial intelligence, and it has nothing to do with robots taking over. "If AI becomes like social media, we're all in trouble," the Sydney-based technologist says.
"That's the worst possible outcome in my mind — controlled by a few companies, a monopoly, something that can be easily abused."
Surtani is Block's Head of Open Source, and he's spent the past year quietly orchestrating something unusual: getting OpenAI and Anthropic — the world's two leading AI labs, whose rivalry spilled into this week's Super Bowl, with Anthropic running ads mocking OpenAI's decision to put advertising inside ChatGPT — to collaborate on an open foundation for agentic AI.
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), established under the Linux Foundation, launched with 60 companies signed up. That number has since grown to 130, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg among the platinum-tier members.
