Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei is an AI researcher and businessman born in San Francisco, in the United States, in 1983. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford University in 2006 and a PhD in physics, focused on biophysics, from Princeton University in 2011. During his PhD he studied how the brain's neural circuits process information, and he then worked as a postdoctoral scholar (a researcher gaining experience after a PhD) at Stanford University School of Medicine, researching ways to detect cancer. Next he worked at the Chinese technology company Baidu, where he noticed that AI models seemed to perform better the more resources were used to train them (scaling). He then worked as a senior research scientist on the Google Brain team.

He joined OpenAI in 2016 and, as Vice President of Research, set the organisation's overall research direction. He led the work to build GPT-2 and GPT-3, which are large language models (AI that learns from huge amounts of text and writes sentences), and he also led teams focused on long-term AI safety research. After leaving OpenAI at the end of 2020, he co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with former OpenAI colleagues and became its CEO. Anthropic is the company that makes the AI model Claude. In October 2024, in his essay 'Machines of Loving Grace', he predicted that with powerful AI the pace of discovery in biology and medicine could increase tenfold or more.

In his January 2026 essay 'The Adolescence of Technology', he warned that in 2026 we are considerably closer to real danger than we were in 2023. In September 2026, in a piece titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier', he proposed slowing the rate at which AI capabilities improve, so that safety measures have time to keep up. On the 23rd of that month he joined Sam Altman at the United Nations Security Council to call for international cooperation on AI risks. Anthropic released its Claude 5.5 family of models one after another from September 2026, and on 26 October it filed papers with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO (offering the company's shares on the stock market). As of October 2026 he is Anthropic's CEO.