Daniela Amodei

Accomplishments

• Co-founded Anthropic at the start of 2021 together with six fellow OpenAI colleagues.⁴⁵
• Serves as Anthropic's President and chair of its Board of Directors, leading research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution.¹
• Served as vice president of safety and policy at OpenAI.⁴
• Helped scale Stripe as part of its early team, managing recruiting and later leading risk operations.⁴³
• Began a career of service in international development and global health, then worked on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer.³⁴
• As President, focused on giving Anthropic the culture and governance to keep exploring AI responsibly.⁵
• Graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2009 with a literature degree and a minor in politics, and champions the humanities as more important than ever in the age of AI.²

Education

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.²³

Early career in global health and public service

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.³⁴

Scaling Stripe and joining OpenAI

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.³⁴

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.³⁴

Co-founding and leading Anthropic

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.⁴⁵

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.¹⁶⁷

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 2025.⁸⁹¹⁰

Vision and recent work

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.³¹¹

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.²³

Timeline

1. 2009Amodei graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a humanities degree in literature and a minor in politics.²
2. 2018Amodei joined OpenAI, later serving as vice president of safety and policy.³⁴
3. 2021Amodei co-founded Anthropic and became its President.⁵¹
4. Apr 29, 2022Amodei described Anthropic's focus on the culture and governance to keep exploring AI responsibly.⁵
5. Mar 14, 2023Anthropic introduced Claude, a next-generation AI assistant.⁸
6. Sep 19, 2023Anthropic published its Responsible Scaling Policy and described its Long-Term Benefit Trust.⁹⁷
7. Feb 23, 2024Amodei spoke at Stanford about building values and ethical guardrails into AI from day one.¹¹
8. Feb 24, 2025Anthropic introduced Claude Code, a command-line tool for agentic coding.¹⁰
9. Jun 29, 2026Stanford Graduate School of Business published Amodei's View From The Top conversation.³

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Vice President of Safety and Policy, OpenAI (2018 –)⁴³
• Early team member who managed recruiting and later led risk operations, Stripe⁴³
• Congressional staffer, U.S. Congress (Capitol Hill)⁴³

Where they work

• Anthropic 34 people in the wiki

Related people

• Jan LeikeAlso at Anthropic
• Neel NandaAlso at Anthropic
• John SchulmanAlso at Anthropic
• Arthur ConmyAlso at Anthropic
• Nicholas CarliniAlso at Anthropic
• Mustafa SuleymanBig SI
• Sundar PichaiBig SI
• Alexandr WangBig SI