MILAN (AP) — The World Anti-Doping Agency called on the United States to pay its overdue membership fees Thursday and rejected Washington's bipartisan demand to submit to an independent audit.
The U.S. has long sought more transparency from WADA, which has been criticized for its handling of politically sensitive doping cases. A government funding bill signed into law this week restricts payment of the $3.7 million in dues until there's an independent audit.
WADA President Witold Banka, speaking at a news conference at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, named a list of audits that his watchdog organization is already subject to and said that's good enough.
“I don’t know any other international organization with such strong auditing mechanisms, so I think there are no obstacles for our friends from U.S. to fulfill their duties and pay the contributions,” he said.
He added: “I think it fulfills the expectations or the wishes from the U.S. side, and the most important thing in principle, the contribution is not conditional. That is the thing which is extremely important for us.”
Sara Carter, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, sent a statement to The Associated Press reiterating U.S. President Donald Trump's strong belief in “supporting U.S. athletes and ensuring fair competition in sports," along with the drug office's insistence on the external audit.
“The United States will not be bullied or manipulated into paying dues to WADA until such is achieved,” Carter said.
The U.S. has already withheld dues under Biden in 2024, then again under Trump in 2025 — a rare point of virtually unanimous bipartisan agreement between the U.S. major political parties. The funding spat accelerated after questions emerged about transparency regarding WADA's clearing of 23 Chinese swimmers after they tested positive for performance enhancers before the Olympics in 2021.
“They should be really careful to go up against the United States Congress,” Rahul Gupta, Carter's predecessor as drug czar, told AP. “It's never a good idea to go up against a bipartisan Congress where both sides of the aisle definitely want this to happen.”
The U.S. law restricts the release of the $3.7 million until there's an audit “by external anti-doping experts and experienced independent auditors” showing that WADA's Executive Committee and Foundation "are operating consistent with their duties.”
WADA statutes say representatives of countries that don’t pay are not eligible to sit on the agency’s top decision-making panels. Gupta was removed from WADA's executive committee when the U.S. first refused to pay.
“I hope very soon they’re going to pay the contribution and come back to the executive committee as a member,” Banka said.
Banka said WADA's budget has grown from $36 million when he started in 2020 to approximately $57 million.
“I wish we could have this money, (these) contributions,” he said of the U.S. fees, “but WADA is financially very stable, so this is not the biggest problem.”
The growing impasse comes at a critical juncture as the United States is set to host major international events, including the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
“All of us around the Olympic Movement are trying to work together to come to a resolution of the dispute between WADA and USADA, and we’ve made good progress on that,” said Gene Sykes, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee president and IOC member.
Sykes had a breakfast meeting with WADA leaders this week but declined to give details.
“We understand the disagreements and the issues," Sykes said.
AP Sports Writers Graham Dunbar and Eddie Pells contributed to this report.
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
United States' Mia Manganello has her fingernails painted in the colors of the United States flag during a speedskating training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
An athlete skis past Olympic rings during a cross country training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Tesero, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
The two artificial intelligence startups behind rival chatbots ChatGPT and Claude are bracing for an existential showdown this year as both need to prove they can grow a business that will make more money than they're losing.
The fiercest competition between the two AI developers, along with bigger companies like Google, is a race to win over corporate leaders looking to adopt AI tools to boost workplace productivity. The rivalry is also spilling into other realms, including the Super Bowl.
Anthropic is airing a pair of TV commercials during Sunday's game that ridicule OpenAI for the digital advertising it's beginning to place on free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT. While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free.
Anthropic’s commercials humorously mock the dangers of manipulative chatbots — represented as real people speaking in a stilted and unnaturally effusive tone — that form a relationship with a user before trying to hawk a product. The commercials end with a written message — “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” — followed by the opening beat and lyrics of the Dr. Dre song “What’s the Difference.”
In a sign they struck a nerve, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post that he laughed at the “funny” ads but blasted them as dishonest and threw shade at his competitor's smaller customer base.
“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” Altman wrote on X. He also boasted that more Texans “use ChatGPT for free” than all the people in the United States who use Claude.
Chiming in to directly challenge Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was OpenAI's president and co-founder Greg Brockman, who questioned whether Anthropic was truly committing to never selling Claude “users’ attention or data to advertisers." Amodei, who rarely posts on X, did not respond.
The rivalry has existed ever since Amodei and other OpenAI leaders quit the AI research laboratory and formed Anthropic in 2021, promising a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms wanted to build. That was before OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of large language models that could help write emails, homework or computer code.
The competition ramped up this week as both companies launched product updates. OpenAI on Thursday launched a new platform called Frontier, designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses adopting a variety of AI tools, including those not made by OpenAI, that can work in tandem, particularly AI agents that work autonomously as “AI co-workers” on someone's behalf.
“We can be the partner of choice for AI transformation for enterprise. The sky is the limit in terms of revenue we can generate from a platform like that,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, told reporters this week.
Anthropic earlier in the week jolted the stocks of legal-software companies with an update to its Cowork assistant that could help automate the work of drafting legal documents.
“Both OpenAI and Anthropic are really trying to position themselves as a platform company,” said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. “The models are important, but the models aren’t a means to an end.”
The two startups aren't just competing with each other. They also face competition from Google, which is both a leading developer of a powerful AI model, Gemini, and has its own cloud computing infrastructure backed by revenue from its legacy digital advertising business. They also have complicated relationships with Amazon, which is Anthropic's primary cloud provider, and Microsoft, which holds a 27% stake in OpenAI.
The first choice for businesses looking to adopt AI agents is typically cloud computing “hyperscalers” like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which offer a package of services, while AI model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI “tend to come in second place,” said Nancy Gohring, a senior research director at IDC.
But there's an opening because none of the players are giving businesses what they want, which are stronger security and compliance assurances to enable the more widespread use of AI agents that can access corporate systems and data.
“Adopting AI and agents is inherently somewhat risky,” Gohring said.
There's also the AI division of Elon Musk’s newly merged SpaceX and its chatbot, Grok, which is not yet a viable contender for business customers. Musk has long set his sights on challenging the market dominance of OpenAI, which he co-founded and is now suing in a court case set for trial in April.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the world's most valuable privately held firms and Wall Street investors expect any, or all of them, could become publicly traded within the next year or so. But unlike SpaceX, which has its rocket business to fall back on, or established tech giants — like Amazon, Google and Microsoft — both Anthropic and OpenAI must find a way to make enough from selling AI products to pay for the huge costs in computer chips and data centers to run their energy-hungry AI systems.
It’s not that Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t making money or growing their product lines. The private firms don’t publicly disclose sales but both have signaled they are making billions of dollars in revenue on their existing products, including paid chatbot subscriptions for individual users.
But it costs a lot more money to fund the computing infrastructure needed to build these powerful AI models and respond to the millions of prompts they get each day. OpenAI, in particular, has said it owes more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to backers — including Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia — that are essentially fronting the compute costs on the expectation of future payoffs.
For some, the wait will likely be worth it.
“Profitability matters, but not as a near‑term decision factor for investors who remain focused on scale, differentiation and infrastructure leverage,” said Forrester analyst Charlie Dai. “Both companies continue to post heavy losses, yet investors still back them because the frontier‑model race demands extraordinary capital intensity.”
Denise Dresser, OpenAI's newly hired chief revenue officer, told reporters this week that the company's priority is “building the best enterprise platform for all industries, all segments.”
“I don’t think we’re thinking about it from a revenue standpoint, but truly from a customer outcome standpoint,” she said, in part reflecting the “sense of urgency” she's heard from CEOs who want a smoother way of applying AI.
“There’s a recognition that AI is becoming a core operating advantage,” Dresser said. “They don’t want to be on the wrong side of that shift.”
FILE - Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
FILE - Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
