Daniela Amodei is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and president of Anthropic, where she oversees operations, finance, policy, and trust and safety.
Early career
Before entering AI, Amodei worked in operations and policy roles, including a position at the payments company Stripe. She later joined OpenAI, where she worked on safety and policy functions as the lab scaled up research that led to systems such as GPT-2 and GPT-3.
Founding Anthropic
In 2021, Amodei co-founded Anthropic together with her brother Dario Amodei and several other former OpenAI colleagues, including Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, and Chris Olah. As president, she has been responsible for building the company's non-research functions from the ground up, including its policy positions on AI regulation, its trust and safety program governing how the Claude models are deployed, and its finance and operations as the company scaled to a large workforce and multibillion-dollar valuation. Unlike her brother, who is Anthropic's most visible public spokesperson on questions of AI capability and existential risk, Daniela Amodei has focused more publicly on practical deployment questions, including how Anthropic engages with regulators on frameworks such as the EU AI Act and other emerging AI governance regimes.
Role and public profile
Amodei has represented Anthropic in congressional testimony and industry forums on responsible AI deployment, often emphasizing the company's Responsible Scaling Policy (see Responsible scaling policies) and its position that safety commitments should be treated as operational requirements enforced across the business rather than as research statements alone. She has also spoken about Anthropic's approach to enterprise and developer trust, an area central to Claude's adoption alongside competing offerings from OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Significance
As one of the few women to co-found and hold a senior executive role at a frontier AI lab, Amodei's leadership of Anthropic's operational and policy functions is frequently cited as a structural counterpart to her brother's research and public-communications role, together forming the leadership core that has shaped Anthropic's identity as a safety-oriented alternative within the generative AI boom. She has also spoken about the challenge of scaling a company's internal processes and hiring at the same pace as its research output, a tension common to every frontier lab that grew rapidly during the mid-2020s.