I love this library. It is an absolutely beautiful library.
I read a lot in general. I don't know that I've had that much time 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, enormous responsibilities for a young, fast-growing startup.
All of this technical safety research that we do, it's to make the products more aligned with human values, to make sure that we're not building something that could cause societal issues that previous technology companies have accidentally caused.
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, 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. We're just keeping in mind all the things we usually keep in mind: 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?
The whole first internet revolution was happening around me and I had absolutely no interest in it. I was just interested in doing math and scrawling 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 lived 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 super intelligence.
I think we need to think right now about how we want this deployed, how everyone gets to benefit from it, how we're gonna govern it, how we're gonna 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.
I know it sounds crazy now, looking back, not a lot of people believed, hey, scaling up is the way that these models are gonna get smarter and better. That was sort of an unusual counter-cultural 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'll 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 a 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 Precita 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, 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 with that happening. That 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 sort of cold, rote, calculating. It should feel approachable, but distant, right? 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? Is there a universal good? There's so many religions, so many different beliefs, how do you even decide that?
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 core values that are consistent across religions, types of belief that really just transcend a specific worldview, but 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 early Claudes, Claude 2 era, sometimes Claude would be almost a little bit nannyish. 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 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 Cowork, which gave that power to everyone else.
Now, early on, others focused on 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 gonna have a hard time. 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 loop we've seen with AI video models, it's like, what's going on? Is it to maximize the number of minutes that you're paying attention to? Because that's the advertising revenue-driven incentive. Whereas if we look at enterprise, 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 serves us well to have this business model that largely aligns with our values.
Soon after Claude Cowork was released, $285 billion in market value vanished overnight. Traders called it the SaaSpocalypse. This kind of white-collar wipeout story in the software sector. Terrifying. Some of those are down for nine 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, 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 not smaller, although there will be some big losers. Those who don't see what's coming, who don't identify the moats they have, they're gonna have a really hard time.
