All people
AI era (2012-present)
Dario Amodei
born 1983
Co-founded Anthropic in 2021; author of the 'Machines of Loving Grace' essay.
Contributions
- 01PhD in computational neuroscience; VP of Research at OpenAI, where he led the GPT-2/GPT-3 scaling work.
- 02Left OpenAI in 2021 with his sister Daniela and a group of senior colleagues — including Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, Chris Olah, and Jack Clark — to co-found Anthropic, citing differences over safety and direction.
- 03Anthropic became the second-largest frontier lab by revenue by late 2025.
- 04Public face of the responsible-scaling-policy framework that Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind variants now use.
Why it matters for alignment science
Amodei's framing of 'powerful AI' and the responsible-scaling-policy framework set the safety baseline that the rest of the frontier-lab field now operates against. The 2021 founding team's exit from OpenAI is the origin event of the two-lab frontier rivalry.
Related reading
Sources
- Anthropic founding announcement, 2021
- Dario Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace," 2024