# Daniela Amodei
**Daniela Amodei** (born 1987 in San Francisco) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the artificial intelligence company [Anthropic](https://www.edgepedia.org/anthropic) and serves as its president and chair of its Board of Directors. As president, she leads the organization's work across research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution and manages the executive team, while her brother [Dario Amodei](https://www.edgepedia.org/dario-amodei) serves as chief executive officer.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/company/leadership) • [2](https://forbes.es/forbes-women/921073/quien-es-daniela-almodei-de-estudiar-musica-a-crear-claude/) The siblings were named together to TIME's first list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023.[3](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai/6309047/daniela-and-dario-amodei/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Role | Co-founder, President, and chair of the Board of Directors of Anthropic; manages the executive team and leads work across research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution[1](https://www.anthropic.com/company/leadership) |
| Founding | Left OpenAI in late 2020 with her brother and other colleagues; Anthropic was founded in early 2021 as a public benefit corporation[5](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2024/6980000/anthropic-2/) |
| Company scale | Anthropic's staff grew from 200 to over 2,000, and the company was valued at $965 billion as of mid-2026[6](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-daniela-amodei-anthropic/) • [7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html) |
| Philanthropy | She, Dario, and the company's other co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth; she announced the $150 million Claude Corps fellowship program in 2026[8](https://apnews.com/article/b1c130a08417d13e1256f8982d233b0e) |
| Education | Degree in English literature; has said she would still major in literature if she started over[9](https://forbes.com.br/forbes-mulher/2026/03/quem-e-daniela-amodei-cofundadora-e-presidente-da-anthropic-empresa-de-ia-banida-por-trump/) • [10](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/daniela-amodei-says-curiosity-underrated) |
| Recognition | TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023, with Dario Amodei); Marie Claire Changemakers (2025)[3](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai/6309047/daniela-and-dario-amodei/) • [11](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/changemakers-2025/) |
## Early life and education
Amodei was born in San Francisco in 1987.[2](https://forbes.es/forbes-women/921073/quien-es-daniela-almodei-de-estudiar-musica-a-crear-claude/) She studied [English literature](https://www.edgepedia.org/english-literature), and in a 2026 interview with [Stanford Graduate School of Business](https://www.edgepedia.org/stanford-graduate-school-of-business) she named Barbara Tuchman's World War I history *The Guns of August* as a favorite book and said she would still major in literature if she had the chance to do it all over again.[9](https://forbes.com.br/forbes-mulher/2026/03/quem-e-daniela-amodei-cofundadora-e-presidente-da-anthropic-empresa-de-ia-banida-por-trump/) • [10](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/daniela-amodei-says-curiosity-underrated)
Her path into technology ran through operations rather than research. A few jobs before Anthropic, she worked at Stripe when it was still a small tech startup, an experience she later cited when arguing that artificial intelligence remained a largely unregulated field compared with financial services.[12](https://futureoflife.org/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/)
## OpenAI
In interviews she has described the group she later left with as representing "the technical safety and policy leadership of OpenAI."[7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html)
In 2020, after OpenAI signed a $1 billion deal with Microsoft, Dario Amodei and several colleagues began discussing leaving; in late 2020 he and six senior staff resigned, and the group founded Anthropic in early 2021.[5](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2024/6980000/anthropic-2/) According to a 2026 Atlantic account of the split, Daniela Amodei led the departing group's side of the separation negotiations with OpenAI, securing the right to take some internal research documents and a mutual non-disparagement agreement in exchange for limits on recruiting OpenAI staff.[13](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/) She has framed the departure as running "towards something rather than running away from something," saying the founders felt their vision was in tension with the organization they worked in.[7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html)
## Anthropic
**Founding and structure.** Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees: Dario and Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, and [Jared Kaplan](https://www.edgepedia.org/jared-kaplan), with Ben Mann added as an eighth co-founder later.[13](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/) The company was organized as a public benefit corporation, a for-profit legal status that Amodei describes as "legally bind[ing] us to balance the benefit of everybody against our commercial interests."[7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html) Its stated mission is to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.[12](https://futureoflife.org/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/)
**Division of labor.** The siblings split responsibilities: Dario focuses on research direction and long-term strategy, while Daniela runs the company day to day, managing the senior leadership team and the practical, financial, and organizational sides of the business.[14](https://stvp.stanford.edu/av/helpful-honest-harmless-ai-entire-talk) • [7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html) In the company's first year, the team rebuilt a large generative language model from scratch after leaving OpenAI; at the start it had about six teams, most of them working on model safety, and it operated as a pure research organization for roughly its first six to nine months.[15](https://stripe.com/at/newsroom/stories/anthropic-interview)
**Growth and products.** Anthropic's chatbot, [Claude](https://www.edgepedia.org/claude-ai), is used by more than 300,000 startups, developers, and companies, and the company became known for "constitutional AI," a training approach that teaches models a baseline set of ethical principles and documents, such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[6](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-daniela-amodei-anthropic/) Amodei has argued that safety is commercially rewarded rather than merely costly: she compares Anthropic's public reporting of its models' limits and jailbreaks to a car company releasing crash-test studies, and says customers building workflows around AI prefer products that hallucinate less and produce less harmful content.[6](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-daniela-amodei-anthropic/) The company raised over $7 billion in the year preceding February 2024, and Amodei implemented a culture-fit interview alongside technical interviews from the beginning, advising founders to write down their values early and make them concrete with examples.[4](https://baincapitalventures.com/insight/anthropic-cofounder-and-president-daniela-amodei-on-how-to-maintain-startup-culture-in-hypergrowth/)
**Public benefit programs.** In 2026 Amodei announced Claude Corps, a fellowship program funded by a $150 million Anthropic donation that will hire and embed 1,000 fellows, trained in the use of Claude, with nonprofits around the United States for a year; host organizations receive a $10,000 grant and free Claude credits. She told The Associated Press the program would be evaluated after its first year and that she hopes it becomes a pillar of the company's strategy to help humankind realize AI's benefits while managing its risks.[8](https://apnews.com/article/b1c130a08417d13e1256f8982d233b0e) She, Dario, and the other co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth.[8](https://apnews.com/article/b1c130a08417d13e1256f8982d233b0e)
## Public positions
Amodei has consistently argued that AI carries both promise and risk. "Anthropic was founded on this belief that AI has great promise but also great risks," she told [Le Monde](https://www.edgepedia.org/le-monde) in 2026, adding that AI "is becoming a geopolitical issue. It's not just the province of business anymore."[7](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html) At a WIRED event she defended the company's safety advocacy against criticism from Trump administration AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who had called Anthropic's approach a "sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering"; she responded that calling out potential dangers makes the industry stronger and that "no one says, 'We want a less safe product.'"[6](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-daniela-amodei-anthropic/)
On governance, she has called for standard-setting bodies and industry groups analogous to those in other regulated industries, and has argued that government should help fund academic safety research as training large models becomes prohibitively expensive for universities.[12](https://futureoflife.org/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/) She has also said that no single company should be the arbiter of AI ethics.[14](https://stvp.stanford.edu/av/helpful-honest-harmless-ai-entire-talk)
## Recognition
Dario and Daniela Amodei appeared together on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI list in 2023.[3](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai/6309047/daniela-and-dario-amodei/) [Marie Claire](https://www.edgepedia.org/marie-claire) named her one of its 2025 Changemakers, describing her as one of the few women leading a major AI company.[11](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/changemakers-2025/) Forbes has included her on lists of the world's billionaires, the world's most powerful women (2025), and America's richest self-made women.[2](https://forbes.es/forbes-women/921073/quien-es-daniela-almodei-de-estudiar-musica-a-crear-claude/)
## References
1. [Leadership at Anthropic, Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/company/leadership)
2. [¿Quién es Daniela Amodei? De estudiar música a crear Claude, Forbes Women España](https://forbes.es/forbes-women/921073/quien-es-daniela-almodei-de-estudiar-musica-a-crear-claude/)
3. [Dario and Daniela Amodei: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, TIME](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai/6309047/daniela-and-dario-amodei/)
4. [Anthropic's Daniela Amodei on How To Maintain Your Startup's Culture in Hypergrowth, Bain Capital Ventures](https://baincapitalventures.com/insight/anthropic-cofounder-and-president-daniela-amodei-on-how-to-maintain-startup-culture-in-hypergrowth/)
5. [Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy, TIME](https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2024/6980000/anthropic-2/)
6. [Anthropic's Daniela Amodei Believes the Market Will Reward Safe AI, WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-daniela-amodei-anthropic/)
7. [Anthropic President Daniela Amodei: 'We must embrace both the positive side and the dark side of AI', Le Monde](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/07/02/anthropic-president-daniela-amodei-we-must-embrace-both-the-positive-side-and-the-dark-side-of-ai_6755092_19.html)
8. [Claude Corps: Anthropic launches team to teach nonprofits to embrace AI, AP News](https://apnews.com/article/b1c130a08417d13e1256f8982d233b0e)
9. [Quem é Daniela Amodei, cofundadora e presidente da Anthropic, Forbes Brasil](https://forbes.com.br/forbes-mulher/2026/03/quem-e-daniela-amodei-cofundadora-e-presidente-da-anthropic-empresa-de-ia-banida-por-trump/)
10. [Daniela Amodei Says Curiosity Is Underrated, Stanford Graduate School of Business](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/daniela-amodei-says-curiosity-underrated)
11. [Introducing Our 2025 Changemakers, Marie Claire](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/changemakers-2025/)
12. [Daniela and Dario Amodei on Anthropic, Future of Life Institute](https://futureoflife.org/podcast/daniela-and-dario-amodei-on-anthropic/)
13. [Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence, The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/openai-v-anthropic-inside-biggest-rivalry-tech/688819/)
14. ['Helpful, Honest, Harmless' AI [Entire Talk], Stanford Technology Ventures Program](https://stvp.stanford.edu/av/helpful-honest-harmless-ai-entire-talk)
15. [Daniela Amodei von Anthropic schildert, wie sie im KI-Medienrummel einen kühlen Kopf (und ihre Prinzipien) behält, Stripe Newsroom](https://stripe.com/at/newsroom/stories/anthropic-interview)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › AI companies, people, and products › AI founders and executives › Applied AI startup founders*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license