# Dario Amodei

Co-founders · CEO at Anthropic · joined 2021

Trained as a biophysicist, worked a stint as a geophysicist, then led research at OpenAI before leaving to start Anthropic.

Full profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people/dario-amodei

> “we didn’t feel that the leadership there was taking these things seriously. And so we decided to go off and do this on our own.” [1](https://www.cfr.org/event/ceo-speaker-series-dario-amodei-anthropic)

**At Anthropic:**
- Feb 2021 – present: CEO and Co-Founder
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)

**Career before Anthropic:**
- Dec 2019 – Dec 2020: OpenAI, Vice President of Research
- Sep 2018 – Dec 2019: OpenAI, Research Director
- Jul 2016 – Sep 2018: OpenAI, Team Lead for AI Safety
- Oct 2015 – Jul 2016: Google, Senior Research Scientist
- Nov 2014 – Oct 2015: Baidu, Research Scientist
- May 2013 – Dec 2014: Skyline Targeted Proteomics Environment, Software Developer (part-time)
- Dec 2011 – Dec 2014: Stanford University, Postdoctoral Scholar
- Feb 2008 – 2013: Applied Minds, Consultant
- Feb 2004 – Sep 2004: Schlumberger, Geophysicist
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)

**Education:**
- PhD, (Bio)physics, Princeton University, 2011
- BS, Physics, Stanford University, 2006
- Progress towards BS, Physics, Caltech, 2001–2003
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)

**Lesser-known facts:**
- Did a PhD in biophysics at Princeton (2011) after a physics degree at Stanford. [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)
- Worked as a geophysicist at Schlumberger in 2004, years before AI. [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)
- Credited as a co-inventor of reinforcement learning from human feedback. [1](https://darioamodei.com/)
- Made the USA Physics Olympiad team in 2000. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei)
- Started college at Caltech as one of Tom Tombrello's Physics 11 students, then transferred to Stanford. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei)
- Worked part-time as a software developer on Skyline, a targeted proteomics tool, and consulted for Applied Minds. [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)
- Worked at Baidu from November 2014 to October 2015, then at Google Brain, before joining OpenAI in 2016. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei)
- Set out his scaling view in a 2017 document called "The Big Blob of Compute Hypothesis" and says he still holds it. [1](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2)
- Runs a biweekly all-hands called the DVQ, short for Dario Vision Quest, speaking for an hour to the whole company. [1](https://fortune.com/article/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-company-culture-40-percent-ipo-ai-tech-leadership/)

**Research papers before Anthropic:**
- Concrete Problems in AI Safety (2016), author 1 of 6: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565
- Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (2017), author 6 of 6: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741
- Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences (2019), author 6 of 8: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08593
- Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (2019), author 5 of 6: https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020), author 31 of 31: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- Learning to Summarize from Human Feedback (2020), author 8 of 9: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01325
- Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling (2020), author 18 of 19: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14701
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020), author 10 of 10: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361

**Interviews and talks:**
- [Dwarkesh Podcast: "We are near the end of the exponential" (2026)](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2)

**Known for:**
- GPT-2
- GPT-3
- Scaling laws for neural language models (2020)
- Deep Speech 2
- Constitutional AI
- Responsible scaling policy
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934)

**Forbes estimate:** $15.5B as of 2026-10-16 (an estimate, not a disclosed holding). [1](https://www.forbes.com/profile/dario-amodei/)

Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-10-18. Everyone at Anthropic: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people