OpenAI’s board of directors approached Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of rival large-language model developer Anthropic, about a potential merger of the two companies, said a person with direct knowledge. The approach came after OpenAI’s board had fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday and was part of an effort by OpenAI to persuade Amodei to replace Altman as CEO, the person said.

It’s not clear whether the merger proposal led to any serious discussion. Amodei quickly turned down the CEO offer due to his position at Anthropic. The 2-year-old startup, which sells Claude, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is in fierce competition with OpenAI to recruit researchers and win customers.