Dario Amodei

California Institute of Technology (attended) Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. In 2021, he and his sister Daniela Amodei co-founded Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude.[2] Before that, he was the vice president of research at OpenAI.[3][4] At US$965 billion as of May 2026, Anthropic is one of the most valuable AI pure play companies, rivaled by OpenAI. Amodei earned a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University. From 2014 to 2016, he worked on machine learning at Baidu and Google Brain. At OpenAI, he worked on the development of GPT-2, GPT-3, and reinforcement learning from human feedback. In 2021, Dario and his sister, Daniela, founded Anthropic along with five other former OpenAI employees including Jared Kaplan and Chris Olah. Amodei has led an AI safety culture at Anthropic, and has expressed a probability of catastrophic harm from AI at 10–25%.[5] Simultaneously, Amodei has advocated for democratic nations to maintain an AI lead to deter authoritarian nations, especially China, via advanced military AI, semiconductor export controls and distillation safeguards.[6][7][8][9] Since 2026, Amodei has also called for a slowdown of AI development, especially recursive self-improvement by democratic states, while engaging China in arms control-analogous diplomacy.[9] Time magazine listed Amodei as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2025 and 2026. Dario Amodei was born in 1983 in San Francisco, California. His sister, Daniela, was born four years later.[1] His father, Riccardo Amodei, an Italian-American leather craftsman from Massa Marittima, Tuscany, died of hepatitis C when Dario was 23 years old.[10][11][12] His mother, Elena Engel, a Jewish American born in Chicago, worked as a project manager[13] for libraries.[1][14]