Dario Amodei
Born 1983 · Age 42
American physicist-turned-AI researcher and entrepreneur; co-founder & CEO of Anthropic; former VP of Research at OpenAI; advocate for AI safety and interpretable, steerable models.
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Life & Career Timeline
Born in San Francisco, California
Dario Amodei was born in San Francisco to Elena Engel and Riccardo Amodei.
Sibling born: Daniela Amodei
His sister Daniela Amodei was born four years after him.
Graduated Lowell High School (approx.)
Grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Lowell High School (exact year not specified; estimated based on birth year).
Began undergraduate studies at Caltech
Started undergraduate work in physics at Caltech; worked with Tom Tombrello as a Physics 11 student before transferring.
Completed BS in Physics, Stanford University
Transferred to Stanford University and earned an undergraduate degree in physics (commencement year reported as 2006).
Named a Hertz Foundation Fellow
Recognized as a Hertz Fellow during graduate studies (Hertz listing links him to the fellowship class/tenure).
PhD awarded (Princeton) — thesis published
PhD in physics from Princeton University; thesis: 'Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits'.
Won Hertz Thesis Prize
Received the Hertz Thesis Prize for his dissertation work connecting theory to experimental device development.
Postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine
Postdoc with Parag Mallick working on mass spectrometry, network models of the proteome, and cancer biomarker research (exact start/end dates not specified).
Contributed to early AI scaling experiments
Work at Baidu helped show model performance improved smoothly with scale (compute, data, model size) — early empirical 'scaling laws' observations.
Joined Baidu as research scientist
Hired by Baidu’s AI effort; worked on large-scale speech recognition and contributed to observations that became part of 'scaling laws' in ML.
Joined Google Brain as senior research scientist
Worked on extending neural network capabilities as part of the Google Brain team (tenure circa late 2015 through 2016).
Left Baidu
Departed Baidu in October 2015 amid reorganizations and talent churn in the lab.
Joined OpenAI
Moved from Google Brain to OpenAI to work on AI safety and large-scale language models.
Appointed Team Lead for AI Safety at OpenAI
Early leadership role focusing on long-term safety research and model alignment.
Became Research Director at OpenAI
Promoted within OpenAI to Research Director, expanding leadership over model development and safety teams.
Promoted to Vice President of Research at OpenAI
Set overall research direction at OpenAI and led efforts on major language models and long-term safety teams.
Led development of GPT-2 (OpenAI)
Played a leadership role in building and fine-tuning GPT-2 (OpenAI’s large language model release that demonstrated scaling benefits).
Led/oversaw development of GPT-3 at OpenAI
Directed major compute/resources for GPT-3, a substantially larger and more capable transformer language model.
Departed OpenAI with several colleagues
In December 2020 Dario, his sister Daniela, Jack Clark, Chris Olah and others left OpenAI due to directional differences (formation of a new effort followed).
Sam Bankman-Fried / Alameda Research investment (~$500M)
FTX / Alameda reportedly invested about $500M for ~13.56% stake in Anthropic in early funding (reporting later raised governance questions).
Co-founded Anthropic (CEO)
Founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela Amodei and multiple former OpenAI senior staff; mission: build reliable, interpretable, steerable AI systems.
Anthropic incorporates as a public-benefit oriented company (PBC-like structure reported)
Anthropic established with a mission emphasis on safety and public benefit (reporting identifies public-benefit corporation-style commitments).
Early Anthropic fundraise — reported $700M first-year funding
Anthropic raised large early capital (reported ~$700M in first year) from investors including Google Cloud and Alameda Research/FTX to secure compute.
Anthropic begins product work on Claude models
Company continued R&D on large language models; roadmap toward conversational assistant 'Claude'.
Named a Hertz Foundation notable & featured in Hertz communications
Hertz Foundation public materials highlighted Amodei's balancing of AI innovation and safety; ongoing fellowship recognition.
Launched Claude chatbot publicly
Anthropic released its Claude conversational assistant (July 2023), designed with safety/constitutional AI approaches and high-EQ behavior.
Testified/warned to U.S. Senate Judiciary panel on AI dangers
Spoke to U.S. senators about AI risks including weaponization and control challenges (July 2023 testimony/briefing coverage).
Approached by OpenAI board about replacing CEO & potential merger; declined
OpenAI board reportedly approached Amodei to replace Sam Altman and to consider merging OpenAI and Anthropic; Amodei declined both offers.
Anthropic research & safety publications gain field influence
Anthropic published research on interpretability, constitutive/constitutional AI and responsible scaling policies that influenced peers.
Faced copyright & dataset litigation (reporting)
Reporting lists Anthropic in copyright suits and negotiations over training data (authors' class actions, music-lyrics claims; dates and outcomes vary).
Published essay 'Machines of Loving Grace'
Amodei published a long-form essay (Oct 11, 2024) about AI's upside and risks and proposed an 'entente' strategy for democratic nations.
Net worth estimate (reported/aggregated estimate)
Multiple outlets and profiles estimate Amodei's net worth in the ~USD 1–1.5 billion range by mid‑2025 (estimates vary with private stake assumptions).
Lightspeed / VC wired $1 billion to Anthropic
At the beginning of 2025 Lightspeed (led by Ravi Mhatre) wired $1B as part of a large fundraising push to scale Anthropic's compute and capacity.
Reported total capital raised approaches ~$20 billion (cumulative)
Reporting (mid-2025) states Amodei has helped bring in nearly $20B of investment to Anthropic (includes large checks from Amazon, Google, VCs).
Reported cumulative major investments from Amazon ($8B) and Google ($3B)
Reporting attributes roughly $8B from Amazon and $3B from Google among Anthropic's backers (figures cited in mid‑2025 coverage).
Public advocacy: entente strategy & export-control proposals
Publicly advocated coalition ('entente') strategy for democracies and supported semiconductor export controls to China; provoked industry debate in 2024–2025.
Released Claude Code (AI coding tool)
Anthropic released Claude Code, targeted at developers and coding workflows (reported February 2025).
Anthropic valuation reported at $61 billion
Reporting places Anthropic's private valuation at approximately $61B (March 2025 reporting).
Annualized revenue reported: $1.4B (March 2025)
Kantrowitz reporting cites Anthropic's annualized recurring revenue at roughly $1.4B in March 2025.
Named in TIME 100 (2025)
Included in Time magazine's 2025 list of the world's 100 most influential people.
Anthropic employee headcount exceeds 1,000
Reported 1,000+ employees at Anthropic around the May 2025 developer conference.
Annualized revenue reported: $3B (May 2025)
Kantrowitz cited Anthropic's annualized run-rate increasing to about $3B by May 2025.
Developer conference: announced Claude 4
At Anthropic's first developer conference (May 2025) Dario introduced Claude 4 and emphasized accelerating cadence of model releases.
Leaked internal memo re: seeking Gulf-state investment
A leaked July 2025 memo by Amodei indicated Anthropic was seeking investments from UAE and Qatar and acknowledged moral compromises.
Annualized revenue reported: ~$4.5B (July 2025)
Kantrowitz reporting cites Anthropic annualized revenue approaching $4.5B by July 2025.
Anthropic part of up-to-$200M DoD AI contract
Anthropic, Google, XAI and OpenAI accepted up to $200M in Department of Defense funding for AI work (reported July 2025).
Key Achievement Ages
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