Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei (born 1987) is the co-founder and president of Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude. A humanities graduate who worked in global health and on a congressional campaign before managing risk teams at Stripe, she joined OpenAI in 2018 and rose to vice president of safety and policy.

Building the safety-first frontier lab

In late 2020 she left OpenAI with her brother Dario Amodei and five colleagues to found Anthropic in early 2021, structured as a public-benefit corporation. As president she runs the commercial machine — sales, operations, policy, people — that turned a research lab into one of the world’s most valuable private companies, while Dario steers research. She frames the founding as “running towards something”: an organization where safety and responsibility sit at the forefront, from responsible-scaling commitments to work on user wellness, child safety, and preventing misuse for weapons development.

Her signature argument is commercial: enterprises do not want unsafe models, so safety is a market advantage rather than a tax. Skeptics counter that Anthropic’s safety branding coexists with raising tens of billions of dollars and racing the very frontier it warns about, and Amodei herself concedes the enterprise is a wager — “AI is ultimately a bet… We could absolutely be wrong,” she told Stanford’s business school. She was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2023.