A few years ago, Dario Amodei “was just another techie in San Francisco”, toiling in relative anonymity and playing video games on Sunday nights with his sister Daniela.
Fast forward to 2026, says The Sunday Times, and the Anthropic co-founder is worth billions.
He runs ones of the fastest-growing and most potentially disruptive companies in the history of capitalism, flits around the world and writes lengthy papers highlighting the dangers of untrammelled AI.
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Unfortunately, he also finds himself in the crosshairs of the Pentagon under Donald Trump.
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In a showdown this week, Amodei was summoned to meet secretary of war Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth gave Amodei an ultimatum. If Anthropic refuses to give the Pentagon free rein on the use of its Claude AI software “for all lawful purposes”, his firm faces penalties far beyond the cancellation of its $200 million contract.
It will be deemed “a supply-chain risk” – a move usually reserved for foreign companies from dubious regimes – forcing any other firm with military contacts to ditch its software.
It might also be compelled to do national-security work under the Defence Production Act.
Trump has been branding Anthropic dangerously “woke” and “ideological” for months.
It’s fair to say that “Amodei’s outspokenness and sharp elbows have earned him both respect and derision”, says Alex Kantrowitz on Medium.
A top-level research director at OpenAI who broke ranks to form Anthropic with his sister in 2021, he has long split opinion in the Valley.
Admirers see a “technological visionary” and “a safety-minded leader”. Critics charge that he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a “control-oriented ‘doomer’ who wants to slow AI progress” – the better to “shape it to his liking and shut out the competition”.
Born in San Francisco in 1983, Amodei became an activist early on. As an undergraduate at Caltech he protested against the Iraq war, railing against fellow students for their “passivity”.
The death of his father in 2006 after a long rare illness had a big impact and he shifted his graduate studies at Princeton from theoretical physics to biology in the hopes of decoding human illness.
A later move into research, studying proteins in and around tumours, prompted his first experimentations with “machine learning”, as it was then known. “The complexity of the underlying problems felt like it was beyond human scale,” he later said. He realised tech could bridge the gap.
Dario Amodei's move into business
Amodei left academia to pursue AI advancement in the corporate world, where there was cash to support it – joining the Chinese search engine Baidu and then, briefly, Google Brain. He was “among the earliest employees of OpenAI”, says the Financial Times, and instrumental in developing the large language models behind ChatGPT.
He left five years later after disagreements with Sam Altman over OpenAI’s direction and “with concerns about AI’s potential for harm if appropriate guardrails were not put in place”.
From the get-go, the company’s mission was simple, says Kantrowitz – build LLMs and “implement safe practices to pressure others to follow”. When the Claude chatbot was released in 2023, it won high acclaim for its “high-EQ personality”.
Meanwhile, Amodei grappled with ethics – and found himself increasingly landing on the side of pragmatism. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
With a float scheduled this year likely to value Anthropic well north of $300 billion, Amodei already has a lot on his plate. The Pentagon stand-off will add to the stress. “They say your values aren’t truly your values until they cost you something,” says Bloomberg. Dario Amodei is about to be tested.
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