Hello everyone, and we are back. It's not every day you get to hear from someone leading one of the most important conversations happening around the world, not just about what AI can do but what it should do. Daniela Amodei is the president and co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the most advanced and fastest growing AI assistants in the world. With a background in public service, Daniela brings a grounded, human-centered approach to one of the most transformational technologies in our lifetime. Under her leadership, Anthropic has championed a new approach to AI safety known as constitutional AI, embedding principles like fairness, transparency, and accountability directly into the way the technology works. Recognized globally as one of the most forward-thinking leaders in the field, it's my absolute pleasure to welcome her to the stage to discuss the intersection of innovation, responsibility, and the future of AI. Please join me in welcoming Daniela Amodei.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Claude has been growing like crazy, but for anyone that isn't familiar with Claude, can you explain what it is?
Absolutely. So hi everyone, I'm Daniela. I am president and co-founder of a company called Anthropic. And Claude is the name of the AI assistant and the models that we develop at my company.
Thank you so much. So before we get into the big questions, I thought we'd start with something fun: a few rapid-fire questions if you're willing.
Excellent. So just say the first thing that comes to mind. Okay. Do you have any favorite or unexpected use cases of Claude?
Um, yes. Claude was really helpful in potty training my toddler.
That is unexpected. Tell us a little more.
Very unexpected. I don't know how many of you are parents, but I have a three-year-old and a negative four-month-old. And potty training is a particular form of hell. And Claude provided just a huge amount of emotional support for me and my husband as we were going through this process with my son, but gave us a lot of practical actionable tips and even helped provide ideas for games and toys and things to do to keep my son occupied when we were potty training him.
That is a really good tip. Thank you. Sure. So if Claude could help with one part of your day, what would it help with?
Well, other than potty training, I really think that Claude can be an incredible tool and partner for productivity. And so much of what I use Claude for in my day to day is really helping me as a leader become better at understanding how to manage well in an organization that's so rapidly scaling. Anthropic was about 300 people a year ago; it's about a thousand people now. And it's really helped me to sort of page a lot of context around the company, my reports, things that I'm working on as a leader, and Claude has been a really great coach and tool for me to partner with.
Very cool, I completely agree. So in five years' time, what's one thing we'll be doing with AI that feels completely unimaginable today?
This is obviously a little bit more aspirational, but we really believe at Anthropic that many of the AI-powered tools that are being developed will be able to help with everything from biomedical science and research. So helping scientists and pharmaceutical companies to develop better, more effective, safe vaccines, helping to cure many diseases that we have been struggling with over the course of human history. So we have really big aspirations at Anthropic, and we believe everything from really fundamental things about how to help make humans live and flourish better, all the way down to really helping to automate many of the tasks that we all have to do day to day.
Very exciting. Yeah, that deserves a clap for sure. It has been such a joy collaborating with you as we have brought Canva Code to life. The care you bring to partnering and iterating on your products has been really impressive and has really resulted in such an extraordinary product. So I'd love to know, what does the process look like for you gathering the feedback and then deciding what you build next?
Anthropic is a little bit unusual in the AI field in that we primarily build for businesses. And so something that's very important to us is really understanding very deeply what are the needs of our customers and our users. And I think we really have this in common with Canva, where we spend a lot of time with our customers of all different stages, really understanding what are the features that will make AI more powerful and transformative within your business, and also what are the core qualities of the model that you want to see more or less of from us. And this has led to a variety of changes that we've made both to how we train the models, what we do with the models, and also the products that we develop for our customers.
It's been extremely impressive being on the other side of that and seeing that being put into practice. So there are a lot of really great similarities between Canva and Anthropic and our values. And some of the values that I love from Anthropic are to act for the global good and to put the mission first. What do those values mean and how do you bring those values to life and lead Anthropic with them?
I think Anthropic was really founded on this belief that you can develop transformative AI technologies in a way that is good and safe and beneficial for people everywhere. And we made a lot of decisions early on in the business. We incorporated as a public benefit corporation because we had this very strong foundational belief that AI was something that would transform how people work and operate together, and we wanted to make sure that we were doing it right. And this has led to a lot of different things that we do in the day to day of a company. So we have an effort called beneficial deployments, where we really think about how we want to help give back to so many different parts of the world, whether that's in education, developing world, healthcare and life sciences. We also have something called a responsible scaling policy, which is a set of commitments that explains transparently what are the ways that we are working to ensure that the technology that we're developing is safe whenever we push a new model to market. And I think there's a lot of other examples, but I think the core foundation for me is that we work very hard every day when we think about making trade-offs within the business: how do we make sure that we live true to these values and how do we make sure that we live up to the public benefit mission under which we're incorporated.
