It is absolutely beautiful library.
Um, you know, I mean I read a lot in general. I don't know that I've had that much time in over the last year or so.
Dario Amodei is an unlikely AI celebrity. He's known for warning the world about the risks of artificial intelligence. Now, his company is an AI frontrunner valued at nearly a trillion dollars.
You're shipping so much so fast. How are you doing that?
We use Claude across the product development cycle and it allows us to release very fast.
Founded by a team of OpenAI defectors in 2021, Anthropic started out as an underdog lab. Today, it's the breakout star wiping billions in value off software stocks, going head-to-head with the Pentagon, and creating models allegedly powerful enough to burst through the walls of modern cybersecurity.
Some of the early companies that we gave this to said things like, 'This is a super weapon. Please don't release this.'
Guiding Anthropic through this is a sibling duo. Dario, the brother and visionary, and Daniela, the sister and operator, who puts Dario's swirling cosmic thoughts into action.
Dario and I, we've always been really close since we were little, but I think we always really wanted to do something big together.
Okay, but when you argue, who wins?
As the AI arms race escalates, the Amodeis are eager to establish themselves as the good guys. But Anthropic's technology could have profound implications for how humanity works, learns, thinks, even fights wars.
Anthropic is run by an ideological lunatic. This is a debate about what the proper use of AI by the government is.
At some point, the models become very dangerous. You know, the bad guys will have it, too. And at that point, we have to make sure the good guys have an even better model.
The name Anthropic actually comes from the Greek word for human, which speaks to their mission to build responsible AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
Can you actually do that when you're building the most powerful technology in the world?
You are at the center of the AI universe right now. What does that feel like?
The experience I've had for my whole career, and certainly the whole time at Anthropic, is that there's this kind of smooth exponential. And the experience of the smooth exponential is nothing's happening, nothing's happening, nothing's happening, little things happen, and then zoom, it goes crazy. So, you know, I was watching this graph for a while, and I said, 'Oh yeah, we'll probably become the AI company with the most revenue and the most valuation sometime around this time.' And indeed it has happened.
Keep in mind all the things we usually keep in mind. You know, how do we train good models? How do we put them in good products? How do we make sure that everything's safe?
What were you like as a kid growing up in San Francisco? I know your dad was a leather craftsman, your mom worked in libraries. How did that shape you?
You know, the whole internet revolution was happening around me, and I had absolutely no interest in it. I was just interested in doing math and scrolling things. I was interested in understanding the universe. I was interested in science fiction. I think I just felt a lot of curiosity about the world.
What was it like growing up with Dario?
He was so smart. He was taking calculus when he was in middle school. He took math classes at UC Berkeley when he was in high school. I was actually more into reading and arts. So, we were almost like complete complements in that way.
Dario studied neuroscience before turning to AI at Baidu and later Google, while Daniela started out as an early employee at Stripe. They live together in San Francisco along with Daniela's husband, Holden Karnofsky. Then, in 2016, Dario joined the newly formed OpenAI, followed by Daniela in 2018. The company began as a nonprofit that promised a safe, more open path to superintelligence.
I think we need to think right now about how we want this deployed, how everyone gets to benefit from it, how we're going to govern it, how we're going to make it safe and sort of good for humanity.
At OpenAI, Dario developed the concept of scaling laws, predicting that large language models would improve simply by adding more data and computing power, even if the underlying algorithm stayed the same.
At that point in time, I know it sounds crazy now looking back, not a lot of people believed, 'Hey, scale up is the way that these models are going to get smarter and better.' That was sort of an unusual, countercultural, scientific perspective that I think was really held by our founding research team.
That approach helped supercharge OpenAI's models, paving the way for ChatGPT. But the Amodeis reportedly clashed with Altman over the company's direction and values. Altman has said, 'For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company.'
Your decision to leave OpenAI has become Silicon Valley lore. What did you disagree on?
Look, I'm going to say it. I'm going to say it very simply. There are many valid disagreements to be had on safety. We certainly had some of those disagreements with them, but that alone is not sufficient to leave. When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest — that makes it very hard to continue to work with the company, to continue to trust the company. And look, at the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them? The way to resolve it is you go off and do your thing, they go off and do their thing.
So this is Presidio Park. When Dario and Daniela decided to leave OpenAI to start Anthropic, this is where the early team would get together. It was during the pandemic, so the story goes, and a bunch of early employees would come here, they'd pull up a chair on the grass, they'd have lunch and they'd talk about what they were building.
When we started this company there were seven co-founders of which me and Daniela are two, and now we're basically the only company in the space that has all of its co-founders still here. You don't get to be a company of the size and scale that we are without that happening. It almost never happens.
From the start, Anthropic pitched itself as the ultimate safety-conscious AI company. Dario has published long essays with names like 'Machines of Loving Grace' and 'The Adolescence of Technology,' musing on the miraculous potential of AI as well as the worst-case scenarios. Anthropic's chatbot Claude has been trained to follow a set of principles called a constitution, intended to keep it on the straight and narrow.
Claude has a very distinct style and feel.
A human name. What are you trying to convey?
I think when people interact with Claude versus other systems, there is more of a feeling of — I like to describe it as professional warmth. So the goal is not for it to be your best friend, but it's not for it to be cold, robotic, calculating. It should feel approachable but distant, professional.
Anthropic has talked about teaching Claude to be good. What is a good model? What is a bad model? You don't want a model that lies accidentally or intentionally, right?
Lying, we call hallucinations — it makes something up. The models are just trained to predict the next word, so sometimes they don't know and they just invent something. Models sometimes, as we've shown in our research, can purposely try to deceive you. We have to make sure that doesn't happen in production models that we expose to customers. And then there's a lot of work around harmlessness, just making sure that the model is not accidentally producing information that is wrong or harmful or could cause someone to do something bad.
Whose values are being put into Claude? Like, is there a universal good? There's so many religions, so many different beliefs. Like, how do you even decide that?
So of course there's no universal standard for what makes something helpful or harmless, but there are founding documents in human history like the UN Declaration of Human Rights that we can use to train Claude's character. And I think, interestingly, on the religious front, we've actually started to have a lot of conversations with religious leaders around how should we think about Claude the entity and how can we bake in some of the kind of core values that are consistent across religions, types of belief, that really just transcend a specific worldview, but that are really things that human beings have been grappling with for millennia.
Have you tried to give Claude a trait that didn't take? Or was there any trait that emerged that surprised you?
I think in the early days, it's funny to look back on them now. The kind of early Claude's, Claude 2 era. Sometimes Claude would be almost a little bit nanny-ish. Claude was like, 'I'm really concerned about you.' And you're like, 'Claude, I was asking for the weather, right?' It was something really benign. Thankfully we didn't release most of the most egregious versions of those. But I think it is, when you think about it, it's like tuning a dial. And so our researchers have this very fine needle to thread in order to land at the center of that.
Whatever Anthropic is doing with Claude, it seems to be working. Anthropic's revenue has skyrocketed over the past year, making the company profitable for the first time. That's largely thanks to the company's focus on more lucrative business tools. Claude Code, a major leap that automated large chunks of software engineering, and Claude Co-work, which gave that power to everyone else.
Now, early on, others focused on fun, flashy consumer apps. You made a bet on coding and enterprise. Why did you make that bet? Was it a values decision or a business decision?
Look, if you pick a business model that fundamentally conflicts with your values, you're going to have a hard time, right? Either you betray your own values or you become irrelevant. And so, when we thought about it, we said, 'Look, we've seen the world of social media, the consumer world — it really seems to encourage engagement, even addiction, the slop we've seen with AI video models. What's going on? It wants to maximize the number of minutes that you're paying attention to because that's the advertising-driven incentive.' Whereas, if we look at enterprise, look, we want to make these models useful to people. We want to use AI to cure diseases that we couldn't cure before. Well, that's working with biotech, it's working with pharma, it's working with academic research groups. All of those are enterprises, right? We want to use AI to make energy cheaper and more efficient. That's all enterprise. And so, I think it served us well to have this business model that largely aligns with our values.
Soon after Claude Co-work was released, 285 billion dollars in market value vanished overnight. Traders called it the SASpocalypse.
This kind of white-collar wipeout story in the software sector, terrifying.
Some of those are down for 9 days in a row, so clearly the tension is building.
If AI continues improving at this pace, how much of traditional software gets replaced and how fast?
I think with AI, like, the pie is getting bigger, right? So, the existing incumbents may be smaller in relative terms. Some of them may go down in value. Some of them may even go out of business if they don't adapt in the right way. But I would guess that the software industry gets larger, not smaller. Although there will be some big losers. Those who don't kind of see what's coming, who don't identify the moat they have, they're going to have a really hard time.
It's sort of the quiet cafe. Anthropic's recent growth spurt might not have happened without this man, Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Co-work. When Anthropic hired him in 2024, Cherny was living a very different life in rural Japan.
