Builder
Dario Amodei
CEO and co-founder, Anthropic
Dario Amodei is co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, the San Francisco AI safety and research company behind the Claude models. He co-founded the company in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and a group of former OpenAI colleagues.
Amodei trained as a physicist and biophysicist. He studied physics at Caltech and Stanford and earned a doctorate in biophysics at Princeton, followed by postdoctoral work at Stanford’s medical school. He worked at Baidu from 2014 to 2015 and joined OpenAI in 2016, where he rose to vice president of research and oversaw work on large language models before leaving at the end of 2020.
He is one of the more prolific public writers among frontier-lab leaders. His October 2024 essay “Machines of Loving Grace” set out how he believes powerful AI could improve health, economics and governance. A January 2026 essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” catalogued risk categories including misalignment, misuse, seizure of power and economic disruption. He tends to use the phrase “powerful AI” rather than Super Intelligence.
In February 2026 Amodei refused a US Department of Defense demand that Anthropic remove contractual limits on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons; the Pentagon subsequently designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the order in March 2026. Under his leadership Anthropic has grown into one of the most highly valued private companies, with a reported $965 billion valuation in May 2026.
Amodei was named to TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2025 and again, with Daniela, in 2026.