Daniela Amodei
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Daniela Amodei (born 1987) is an American business executive, the President and a co-founder of Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that develops the Claude family of large language models. She founded the company in 2021 with her brother Dario Amodei, who serves as chief executive, after both left OpenAI along with several colleagues.[1][2] As President, she oversees Anthropic's commercial, operations, finance, legal, communications, and people functions, leaving research direction largely to her brother and Anthropic's chief scientists.[1] By 2026 she had become one of the most prominent female executives in generative AI, named to the TIME 100 AI list, to Fortune's Most Powerful Women ranking, and jointly with her brother to the TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.[14] She also sits on Anthropic's Board of Directors.[15]
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987, San Francisco, California |
| Education | Bachelor of Arts, English Literature (UC Santa Cruz), 2009 |
| Occupation | Business executive |
| Title | President and co-founder of Anthropic |
| Employer | Anthropic |
| Board service | Anthropic Board of Directors |
| Spouse | Holden Karnofsky (m. 2017) |
| Family | Dario Amodei (brother) |
Daniela Amodei was born in 1987 in San Francisco, California.[1] Her father, Riccardo Amodei, was an Italian American leather craftsman from Massa Marittima in Tuscany, and her mother, Elena Engel, was a Jewish American from Chicago who worked as a project manager for libraries.[1] Her father died when she was a young adult after a long illness. She grew up in San Francisco and attended Lowell High School, the city's selective public school, before going on to college.[1]
She received a classical flute scholarship to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and a minor in politics.[1][16] While at UC Santa Cruz she won the campus Concerto Competition in 2008, performing as a soloist with the university's orchestra.[1] Her older brother Dario, who would later co-found Anthropic with her, studied physics and biology at Stanford and Princeton during the same period.[3]
Daniela's path into the technology industry was indirect. Although her brother went into computational neuroscience and machine learning, her early interests were in literature, languages, music and politics, which would later shape her view of AI as a humanistic problem as much as a technical one.[12] In a 2026 interview she argued that humanities graduates are underrated for jobs in AI because so much of the work consists of writing, communication, and reasoning under ambiguity, telling Fortune that "studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever" in an AI driven economy.[12]
After college, Amodei spent several years working in international development and global health in roles she has described as small program management jobs in low income countries, including time with the Uganda based NGO Conservation Through Public Health.[17] The experience left her interested in policy and politics, which led her to a Pennsylvania congressional campaign in 2012.[1]
She joined the campaign of Matt Cartwright, a Democratic challenger running for a House seat in northeastern Pennsylvania, as a field organizer and later deputy field director. She personally recruited volunteers and ran door knocking and phone banking operations in the district.[1] After Cartwright won the seat, she followed him to Washington, D.C., where she worked briefly in his congressional office handling scheduling and legislative correspondence in the first half of 2013.[13] She left politics for the technology industry later that year.[1]
In 2013, Amodei joined the payments company Stripe as an early employee. She started as the company's first non founder recruiter and was tasked with hiring engineers and operators as Stripe scaled from a small startup into one of the more visible fintech firms of the decade; she has described helping grow the engineering team from roughly forty people to several hundred during her tenure.[17] Over the next several years she moved through a series of operational roles at Stripe, including technical recruiting lead, risk program manager and then risk manager, where she worked on user policy and underwriting decisions in collaboration with engineering, machine learning and legal teams.[17] By the time she left she had spent roughly five years at the company and had touched recruiting, trust and safety, and operations.[1]
In 2018 Amodei left Stripe and joined OpenAI, the San Francisco AI research laboratory then transitioning from a nonprofit lab into a hybrid capped profit organization. Her brother Dario had joined OpenAI a couple of years earlier and would soon become its Vice President of Research.[3] She joined initially as an engineering manager, then took on broader operational responsibilities, eventually becoming Vice President of Safety and Policy.[1]
In that role she helped build the processes by which OpenAI evaluated whether to release new models. She managed teams during the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3, including the staged release of GPT-2 in 2019, which OpenAI initially declined to fully open source on safety grounds and which became one of the first public debates about model release norms in modern AI.[1] The processes she helped set up, including red teaming, model cards and policy review before deployment, became templates that other AI labs later adopted.
By late 2020, Daniela, her brother and several of their closest colleagues at OpenAI had grown uncomfortable with the lab's direction, particularly the speed of commercialization following the Microsoft partnership and disagreements over how safety and product strategy should interact.[2][3] Together they decided to leave and start a new company.
Anthropic was incorporated in early 2021. The company was registered in California as a public benefit corporation in February 2021, with seven co-founders: Daniela Amodei, her brother Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark, and Chris Olah.[2] All seven had been senior figures at OpenAI; Tom Brown had been a lead author on the original GPT-3 paper, Jared Kaplan was known for the neural scaling laws work, Jack Clark had run policy, and Chris Olah was a leading interpretability researcher. Several other early employees, including Ben Mann, came over from OpenAI in the same wave and are sometimes described as part of the founding cohort.[2]
From day one, Daniela took on the President role while Dario became chief executive. The split has been described, including by both siblings in interviews, as a deliberate division of labor: Dario sets research direction and writes about AI policy and risk, while Daniela runs the company.[18] In practice that has meant she owns operations, finance, legal, communications, recruiting, real estate, security and the commercial organization, while research, model development and safety research report up to Dario.[1][18] She has said in interviews that several of the founding team had previously reported to either her or Dario at OpenAI, and that the founders had been "in her orbit for fifteen years" before incorporating Anthropic, which she credits with making the early decision making unusually fast.[19]
Anthropic positioned itself from the start as an AI safety company. Its stated mission is to do research on and build safe AI systems, and the founders argued that being at the frontier of capability was necessary in order to study frontier risks.[15] The company chose to incorporate as a public benefit corporation, and in 2023 it created the Long Term Benefit Trust, a separate body of trustees with the legal power to elect a portion of the board, intended to act as a counterweight to short term commercial pressure.[15]
As President, Amodei runs the day to day operations of Anthropic. She has described her remit as the President's portfolio, covering operations, strategy execution, partnerships, finance, legal, security, communications, recruiting and culture.[18] The research organization, including pretraining, alignment, interpretability and the safety teams, reports through her brother and through chief scientists Jared Kaplan and Sam McCandlish.[1]
Under her watch, Anthropic has grown from a small research lab of a few dozen people in 2021 into a company estimated at between roughly 2,300 and 5,000 employees by 2026, with reporting varying by source and methodology.[20] She has overseen the build out of Anthropic's go to market organization, its enterprise sales arm, its partnerships with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, and the international expansion of the company into Europe and Asia.[21] She has also been the public face of the company on hiring, organizational culture and the question of how to structure an AI lab that takes safety seriously while competing in a market that rewards speed.[11][12]
In December 2025, Amodei told Fortune that she had been "probably the leader who's been the most skeptical and scared of the rate at which we're" scaling, but said she had been "continually, pleasantly surprised" that the company's operational and cultural integrity had held up as headcount and revenue expanded.[18] She has described the internal culture as one of "low politics" and "high integrity," in which employees are expected to raise concerns directly with colleagues rather than through back channels.[19]
Under Amodei's tenure as President, Anthropic raised one of the largest sequences of private financing rounds in technology history. The company raised an early round of around 124 million dollars in 2021, then a 580 million dollar round in 2022 that included a now infamous investment from FTX.[2] Beginning in 2023, Amazon committed up to 4 billion dollars in a strategic investment that was later expanded to 8 billion dollars by November 2024, and Google committed more than 2 billion dollars over a similar period.[2] The pace of funding accelerated in 2025 and 2026.[5][6][22]
| Round | Date | Amount | Post money valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed and Series A | 2021 | About $124 million | Not disclosed |
| Series B | 2022 | $580 million | Not disclosed |
| Series C | 2023 | More than $1 billion | About $4 billion |
| Series D | Late 2023 to 2024 | Multi billion (Amazon and Google) | About $18 billion |
| Series E | March 2025 | $3.5 billion | $61.5 billion |
| Series F | September 2025 | $13 billion | $183 billion |
| Series G | February 2026 | $30 billion | $380 billion |
Anthropic's Series F at a 183 billion dollar post money valuation in September 2025 was led by ICONIQ with Fidelity and Lightspeed as co leads, and was disclosed alongside numbers showing that run rate revenue had risen from roughly 1 billion dollars at the start of 2025 to more than 5 billion dollars by August.[6] In February 2026, the company announced a 30 billion dollar Series G led by GIC and Coatue, with D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX as co leads, valuing Anthropic at 380 billion dollars post money and ranking, at the time, as the second largest venture funding deal on record.[22][23] Anthropic's chief executive disclosed at the same time that run rate revenue had reached about 14 billion dollars and that roughly 80 percent of revenue came from enterprises.[23] By May 2026 the company also announced a SpaceX backed compute agreement giving it access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs.[23] Forbes added Amodei to its billionaires list in 2025, with estimates of her stake placing her wealth in the multibillion dollar range; in February 2026 it estimated her net worth at about 7 billion dollars, although the precise figure has fluctuated as Anthropic's valuation has changed.[1]
Amodei has become a regular speaker at industry conferences, on podcasts, and in print interviews, and her public remarks tend to cluster around a few themes.
In 2023, Anthropic published its Responsible Scaling Policy, a framework that defines AI Safety Levels (modeled loosely on the biosafety levels used in life sciences research) and commits the company to specific safety evaluations and mitigations before deploying models above each level.[15] Amodei has defended the policy in interviews as a way of making safety commitments concrete and externally checkable rather than aspirational, and she has urged other frontier labs to publish similar policies.[15] In a May 2026 talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she described safety as "a form of radical responsibility for the technology" being developed, encompassing concerns about weapons misuse, child safety and misinformation.[24] She acknowledged the discomfort of telling enterprise customers that releasing unsafe models, despite market demand, would be irresponsible.[24]
In multiple interviews she has argued that enterprises buying AI care about reliability, predictability and risk, and that a lab that invests in interpretability, evaluation and alignment can win business precisely because its models behave more consistently.[25] "Trust is what unlocks deployment at scale," she told Fast Company, adding that "in regulated industries, the question isn't just which model is smartest, it's which model you can actually rely on, and whether the company behind it will be a responsible long term partner."[25] She has used this argument to push back against the framing that safety and commercial success are in tension.
A third recurring theme is what she has called doing more with less. In a January 2026 interview with CNBC, she described Anthropic's strategy as a deliberate bet that compute efficient research and a smaller, more focused team can outperform much larger competitors, arguing that the next phase of the AI boom would not be won by the biggest pre training runs alone but by who could deliver the most capability per dollar of compute.[11] In the same interview she repeated a phrase she has attributed to colleagues, that "the exponential continues until it doesn't," cautioning that despite years of accelerating progress Anthropic could be wrong about how long the trend will hold.[26] She identified change management, procurement delays and unclear enterprise use cases as potential limits on how quickly the economy can absorb frontier AI.[26]
A fourth recurring theme is hiring and the value of non technical training. In a February 2026 Fortune interview she said studying the humanities would be more important than ever in an AI driven economy, and that Anthropic looked for "people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious."[12] In an ABC News interview that aired around the same time she said the number of jobs that AI could do without any help from people was "vanishingly small," and that humans paired with AI would produce more meaningful, challenging and interesting work, not less.[12] She has framed both messages as a rejection of utopian and dystopian framings of AI's labor impact in favor of a complementary view, citing Anthropic's own Economic Index data showing that AI in practice tends to complement rather than replace workers.[24]
In a Sixth Street podcast conversation released in early 2026, Amodei described 2025 to 2026 as a step change in model capabilities, with Claude for the first time able to "actually go onto your computer and move your files around or open them or process them," reflecting Anthropic's investment in agentic systems and Claude Code, the company's coding agent that by late 2025 was generating more than 500 million dollars in run rate revenue.[19][6] She has also explained Anthropic's Constitutional AI approach as giving models "a framework for thinking about ethics" rather than a system of reward and punishment, arguing that it has tended to increase both ethical behavior and overall capability.[19] On deployment she stresses the importance of "a human in the loop" in regulated areas such as healthcare and finance, and on medical advice in particular she has said that while Claude can sometimes outperform clinicians on complex cases, users should always consult licensed professionals because models "make things up sometimes."[24]
She has spoken about the structure of Anthropic itself, including the Long Term Benefit Trust and the company's status as a public benefit corporation, framing both as attempts to design governance that does not collapse under commercial pressure as the stakes get higher.[15][2] She has also publicly defended Anthropic's willingness to refuse contracts that conflict with its safety principles, framing the company's stance as a "race to the top" in which sharing safety research is intended to raise standards across the industry rather than lower them.[17]
At a Stanford appearance in May 2026 and in subsequent interviews she offered advice on choosing co founders, suggesting that aspiring entrepreneurs should "go on vacation together" with a prospective co founder before starting a company, because if afterward "you're like, really, I'm gonna need a vacation to recover from my vacation, it might be the wrong choice."[27] She added that co founders should be able to "lock yourself in another room" and "draw a picture of what it is you're trying to build" and emerge with similar drawings rather than "one having drawn a unicorn and the other a platypus."[27]
In August 2017, Daniela Amodei married Holden Karnofsky, a writer and philanthropic strategist who had co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 and the grantmaking foundation Open Philanthropy in 2014.[1][4] Karnofsky was for years the chief executive and then co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy and a prominent figure in the effective altruism movement, writing about AI safety, philanthropy and long term risks on his blog Cold Takes.[4]
In 2025, Karnofsky joined Anthropic in a role focused on responsible scaling and AI safety strategy, a hire that drew attention because of his marriage to the company's President.[10] The couple have one son. They are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.[1]
Daniela's family has been the subject of significant press coverage because of the unusual fact that the President and the CEO of one of the most valuable AI companies in the world are siblings.[28] Both Amodeis have described growing up in a household that took ideas seriously and have credited their parents with encouraging intellectual curiosity.[1][3]
| Year | Honor | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI (with Dario Amodei) | TIME[7] |
| 2024 | TIME 100 AI | TIME[8] |
| 2024 | Fortune Most Powerful Women | Fortune[9] |
| 2025 | Forbes Billionaires List | Forbes[1] |
| 2025 | Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women | Forbes[1] |
| 2026 | AIwire People to Watch | AIwire[21] |
| 2026 | TIME 100 Most Influential People (with Dario Amodei) | TIME[14] |
In September 2023, Daniela and Dario Amodei were named jointly to TIME's inaugural 100 Most Influential People in AI list, one of the few sibling pairs included.[7] She was named again to the TIME 100 AI list in 2024.[8] In 2024 she was included in Fortune's Most Powerful Women ranking.[9] In 2026 the siblings were named together to the broader TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World list, with Anthropic by then valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars and Claude widely deployed across consumer and enterprise products.[14] The same year, the publication AIwire included her in its People to Watch list, citing her management of Anthropic's commercial scale up and her public advocacy for responsible scaling.[21]
| Years | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 to 2013 | Cartwright for Congress | Field director, then deputy field director |
| 2013 | U.S. House of Representatives, Office of Rep. Matt Cartwright | Scheduler and legislative correspondent |
| 2013 to 2018 | Stripe | Recruiter, technical recruiting lead, risk program manager, risk manager |
| 2018 to 2020 | OpenAI | Engineering manager, then Vice President of Safety and Policy |
| 2021 to present | Anthropic | Co-founder and President (also Board of Directors) |