Dario Amodei

 

Dario Amodei (born 1983) is the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, the AI safety and research company behind the Claude large language model series.

OpenAI Tenure: Before founding Anthropic, Amodei was the Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he played a pivotal role in the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3.

Previous Roles: He also held research positions at Google (focused on natural language processing and safety) and Baidu, where he helped lead the Deep Speech 2 project.

Education: He holds a PhD in Physics from Princeton University and completed his undergraduate studies in physics at Stanford University (after transferring from Caltech).

Founding Vision: Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with several former OpenAI colleagues, including his sister Daniela Amodei. The move was driven by a desire to prioritize AI safety, steerability, and interpretability over rapid commercialization.

Scaling Laws: He was one of the early researchers to document "scaling laws," observing that AI performance improves predictably as compute and training data increase.

Recent Predictions (2026): Amodei has recently gained attention for his "apocaloptimist" views, predicting that AI could reach a level equivalent to a "country of geniuses in a data center" within the next few years.

Economic Impact: He warns that AI could significantly disrupt up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in fields like law and finance by 2030, while simultaneously boosting annual GDP growth by 10-20%.

As of early 2026, Anthropic's annualized revenue is reported to be approximately $14 billion, with the company planning to spend $50 billion on AI infrastructure in the U.S.. Amodei continues to advocate for transparency legislation and international cooperation to manage the national security risks of advanced AI.