Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei is the co-founder and president of Anthropic and chairs its board of directors. Anthropic's official biography says she leads the company's work across research, engineering, product, governance and commercial execution and manages the executive team. Her brother Dario, four years older, is the chief executive.

She came to AI from outside it. She studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, worked in international development, and then on Capitol Hill and a congressional campaign. Around 2013 she joined Stripe when, as she told a Stanford audience in 2026, it had about 40 people and her friends in Washington asked why she was leaving "to go do what? Payments?" She spent almost six years there, running risk and recruiting teams and ending as head of risk operations.

She joined OpenAI in 2018. Wired reported that she managed the team that built GPT-2, the model whose staged release in 2019 first made the Amodeis' concerns about language models public, and she later became vice president of safety and policy. At the end of 2020 she and her brother left with five colleagues; in January 2021 the group met for the first time under a tent in Dario's backyard to pitch the company that became Anthropic.

Since then she has handled the side of the company that is not research: hiring, operations, sales, governance and the executive team that took Anthropic from a few dozen people to thousands. When Mike Krieger moved from chief product officer to the Labs incubator in January 2026, he reported to her. Asked in 2026 why the founders left OpenAI, she said, "We were running towards something versus running away from something."