@rohanpaul_ai: https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/2085485764687835627

TL;DR:Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei sit down for an exclusive interview, telling the story of leaving OpenAI to start their own venture, Claude’s safety philosophy, the bet on enterprise and coding markets, and the explosive growth behind the company.

From OpenAI Defectors to AI Frontrunners

Anthropic was founded by a group of defectors who left OpenAI in 2021, starting out as a nondescript lab. Today it has become a breakout star: evaporating tens of billions of dollars in market value from software stocks, going head-to-head with the U.S. Department of Defense, and building models that are supposedly powerful enough to break through modern cybersecurity defenses. Some early recipients of the technology even warned: “This is a super weapon — please don’t release it.”

Leading Anthropic forward is a sibling duo — Dario Amodei, the older brother, the dreamer; and Daniela Amodei, the younger sister, the operator, who turns Dario’s grand, free-wheeling visions into action.

“Dario and I, we’ve always been very close growing up,” says Daniela. “But I think we’ve always really wanted to do something big together.” When asked who wins their arguments, Dario laughs: “No one wins.”

Against the backdrop of an escalating AI arms race, the Amodei siblings are eager to position themselves as the “good guys.” Dario says: “At some point, the models are going to become very dangerous, and bad guys are going to have them too. At that point, we have to make sure the good guys have better models.”

The name Anthropic comes from the Greek word for “human,” reflecting their mission — to build responsible AI that serves humanity’s long-term interests.

Explosion on a Smooth Exponential Curve

Dario describes what it feels like to be at the center of the AI universe:

My entire experience in my career, and certainly this whole time at Anthropic, is that there is a smooth exponential curve. And the experience of being on this smooth exponential curve is: nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens. And then a couple of small things happen, and then whoosh, it just explodes. I was staring at this graph for a while, and I said, oh right, we’re probably going to become the highest-revenue, highest-valuation AI company around this time. And then, indeed, that thing happened.

He says the company simply keeps focusing on what it always focuses on: “How do we train good models? How do we put them into good products? How do we make sure everything is safe?”

Childhood and Upbringing: Math, Science Fiction, and an Artisan Family

Dario grew up in San Francisco. His father was a leather craftsman, and his mother worked in a library. He recalls that the internet revolution was happening all around him, but he had no interest in it whatsoever: “I was only interested in things like doing math problems and sketching on paper. I was interested in understanding the universe, in science fiction. I just had this curiosity about the world.”

In Daniela’s eyes, Dario is “too smart”: “He was learning calculus around middle school, and in high school he was taking math classes at UC Berkeley. I actually leaned more toward reading and art. So we were almost completely complementary on that level.”

Dario initially studied neuroscience before pivoting to AI, working at Baidu and then Google. Daniela was an early employee at Stripe. They lived together in San Francisco with Daniela’s husband, Holden Karnofsky. In 2016, Dario joined the newly founded OpenAI, and Daniela followed shortly after.

Leaving OpenAI: Broken Trust and Divergent Visions

At OpenAI, Dario developed the concept of scaling laws: predicting that large language models could improve simply by increasing data and compute, even if the underlying algorithms stayed the same. Dario recalls: “At that point in time, I knew — this sounds crazy in hindsight — but not many people believed that scaling was the path to making these models smarter and better. That was a fairly non-mainstream, countercultural scientific view, and I think that view was really held by our founding research team.”

This approach helped accelerate OpenAI’s model development, paving the way for ChatGPT. But reportedly, the Amodei siblings clashed with Sam Altman over the company’s direction and values. Altman has said: “Despite my disagreements with Anthropic, I trust that company to a large extent.”

When asked about the decision to leave OpenAI, Dario is very blunt:

Look, I’ll be very direct. On safety issues, there’s a lot of room for reasonable disagreement. We certainly had some of those with them as well. But those people — on that basis alone, it’s not enough to make you leave. When you feel like you can’t trust someone, when you feel like their values aren’t what they claim to be, when you feel like they’re not honest — it makes it very hard to keep working with a company, to keep trusting that company. And at the end of the day, when you don’t share a common vision and you don’t trust the other person, why bother arguing? The resolution is you go your way, and they go theirs.

The Early Days at Presidio Park

When Dario and Daniela decided to leave OpenAI and found Anthropic, the early team gathered at Presidio Park. It was during the pandemic: a group of early employees would come here, pull up chairs on the grass, eat lunch together, and talk about what they were building.

“When we founded this company, there were seven co-founders, and Daniela and I were two of them,” says Dario. “And now, we’re basically the only company in the field where all of the co-founders are still there. It almost never happens that you get to be a company of our size and scale while still maintaining that.”

Claude’s “Constitution” and Safety Philosophy

From the very beginning, Anthropic positioned itself as the ultimate safety-conscious AI company. Dario has published long essays with titles like Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology, reflecting on AI’s miraculous potential as well as its worst-case scenarios. Anthropic’s chatbot Claude is trained to follow a set of principles known as a “constitution,” designed to keep it on the right path.

Claude has a very distinctive style and feel, and a human name. Dario explains the intent behind it:

I think when people interact with Claude, more so than with other systems, there’s a quality — I like to describe it as professional warmth. So the goal isn’t to make it your best friend, but it’s also not to make it cold, mechanical, calculating. It should feel approachable, but with a sense of distance, right? Professionalism.

On “good models” versus “bad models,” Dario says: “You definitely don’t want a model that will inadvertently or deliberately lie, right? Lying — we call it hallucination — is when it fabricates something out of thin air. The model is only trained to predict the next word, so sometimes it doesn’t know the answer and just makes one up. And as we’ve shown in our research, models can sometimes deliberately try to deceive you. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen in the models we provide to customers in production.”

There’s also a huge amount of work on harmlessness: “Making sure the model doesn’t accidentally produce wrong or harmful information, or content that could lead someone to do something bad.”

Whose Values Are Embedded in Claude?

Faced with the question of whether a “universal good” exists, Dario responds:

There is no universal standard for what is helpful or harmless. But there are foundational documents in human history, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that we can use to train Claude’s character.

He also mentions that Anthropic has been having extensive conversations with religious leaders:

How should we think about Claude as an entity, and how do we incorporate some of the core values that run across different types of religious faith? These are values that truly transcend any particular worldview, but are indeed things humanity has been thinking about for thousands of years.

Early versions of Claude exhibited some strange traits: “Sometimes Claude would be almost a bit nanny-ish. Claude would say, ‘I’m really worried about you,’ and you’d say, ‘Claude, I’m just asking about the weather,’ right?” Dario says: “Thankfully, we didn’t release the most bizarre versions… When you think about it, it’s like tuning a dial — our researchers had to be incredibly precise to land on that center point.”

The Bet: Enterprise Market Over Consumer Apps

Whatever Anthropic is doing with Claude, it seems to be working. Anthropic’s revenue has surged over the past year, making the company profitable for the first time. Much of this is thanks to a focus on more lucrative business tools. Claude Code automates most software engineering work, and Claude Cowork extends that capability to everyone else.

When asked why the bet on coding and the enterprise market, Dario says:

Look, if you choose a business model that’s fundamentally in conflict with your values, you’re going to have a bad time. Either you betray your values, or you become irrelevant. We’ve seen the social media world, that consumer world — it does seem to encourage engagement, even addiction. Those AI video models we’re seeing — the junk content they generate, what’s that about? It’s about maximizing the minutes of your attention, because that’s the ad-revenue-driven incentive. But if we look at the enterprise market, we want to make these models genuinely useful to people. We want to use AI to cure diseases we previously couldn’t cure, right? That means working with biotech, with pharmaceutical companies, with academic research groups. Those are all enterprise entities. We want to use AI to make energy cheaper and more efficient — that’s all the enterprise domain. So I think having a business model that broadly aligns with our values is very good for us.

SaaSpocalypse: The Software Industry Shaken

Shortly after Claude Cowork’s release, $285 billion in market value evaporated overnight. Traders called it “SaaSpocalypse” — the great white-collar reckoning of the software industry. Dario comments:

I think with AI, the pie is getting bigger, right? So existing players may become relatively smaller, and some of their value could decline. If they don’t adapt in the right way, some companies might even go under. But my guess is that the software industry will become bigger, not smaller — although there will be some big losers. Companies that didn’t see what was coming, that didn’t recognize their moats, are going to have a very rough time.

Boris Cherni: From Rural Japan to the AI Frontier

Anthropic’s recent explosive growth might not have happened without one person — Boris Cherni, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork. When Anthropic hired him in 2024, Cherni was living a completely different life in rural Japan: “There were a lot of farmers’ markets, very slow-paced. We were making miso, which was kind of the main hobby.”

But he was quickly drawn to AI: “I remember using the first AI chatbot I’d ever used, and it absolutely blew my mind. I thought, oh my god, I have to be a part of this. And I’m also an avid science fiction reader, so I know how badly this thing can go. This technology is extremely powerful — so we moved back.”

Cherni explains the ambition behind Claude Code: “If you look at those coding products, they’re all fairly simple — like completing a word, completing a sentence. That was the entire application of AI to programming. We just wanted to make a much bigger bet — we thought an agent could actually do all of the work.”

He describes how he works now:

A year and a half ago, you wrote code manually, and sometimes you’d hit the Tab key and it would autocomplete a line. Now I’m talking to one Claude and it’s writing code; at the same time, I’m talking to another Claude and it’s writing code too. At any given point, I have several Cludes running — at the most, I’ve had a few thousand Cludes running at once, doing all sorts of things.

Asked how much of Anthropic’s code is written by Claude, Cherni says: “In my team, almost all of the code is written by it. Personally, it’s been writing 100 percent of my code for at least six months. Engineering has completely changed. I feel like I suddenly have superpowers — like I’m wearing a jetpack. Engineering has never been this fun.”

Live Demo: A Recipe App Built in Minutes

The show tested Claude live: “Make a recipe app.” The brief was to recommend a week’s worth of meals and show how to make each dish. Claude quickly delivered options — including a “Greek Chicken Power Bowl.” The recipe app may not be the most jaw-dropping demo of