Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2009 with a humanities degree in literature and a minor in politics. Amodei has kept that grounding close: in a 2026 View From The Top conversation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Amodei said that, given the chance to do it again, Amodei would probably major in literature again.89

Amodei's career began in international development, working in global health, and continued on Capitol Hill, where Amodei served as a congressional staffer. Looking back, Amodei has described simply trying to take the next best step at each stage of a career that would lead into technology.911

Amodei next joined Stripe, which Amodei recalls as a tiny company that at the time nobody had heard of. As part of Stripe's early team, Amodei managed recruiting and later led risk operations, spending almost six years at the company and working closely with its engineers.911

In 2018, Amodei joined OpenAI, where Amodei became vice president of safety and policy. Amodei has expressed gratitude that, at both Stripe and OpenAI, Amodei was given opportunities across different parts of the company.911

Seven colleagues left OpenAI together to co-found Anthropic, which began at the start of 2021, and Amodei became its President. In April 2022, Amodei explained that Anthropic was focused on ensuring it had the culture and governance to continue to explore responsibly.113

Today Amodei serves as chair of Anthropic's Board of Directors and, as President, leads the organization's work across research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution and manages the executive team. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation whose purpose is the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, and its board is elected by stockholders and by its Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body of financially disinterested members.124

During Amodei's tenure as President, Anthropic introduced Claude in March 2023, published its Responsible Scaling Policy in September 2023, and introduced the agentic coding tool Claude Code in February 2025.567

Amodei describes being a career manager who spends most of the time with people, and Stanford's speaker biography notes that Amodei leverages that people and management experience to further Anthropic's goal of building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. In a February 2024 talk at Stanford, Amodei discussed how Anthropic's co-founders built values and ethical guardrails into their AI tools from day one.910

Amodei is a champion of the humanities in the age of AI, saying that studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever, and expects human-centered skills to become much more prized as AI changes the kinds of jobs people do. Amodei describes Anthropic's approach as taking a form of radical responsibility for the technology it builds.89