# Jared Kaplan

Co-founders · Chief Science Officer at Anthropic · joined 2021

A theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins who co-wrote the 2020 scaling-laws paper while consulting for OpenAI.

Full profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people/jared-kaplan

**At Anthropic:**
- Oct 2024 – present: Responsible Scaling Officer
- Jan 2021 – present: Co-founder and Chief Science Officer
Sources: [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kaplan)

**Career before Anthropic:**
- Jan 2019 – Dec 2020: OpenAI, Research Consultant
- Sep 2012: Johns Hopkins University, Professor
- Sep 2009 – Aug 2013: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Postdoctoral Researcher
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-kaplan-645843213)

**Education:**
- Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Physics, Harvard University, 2009
- Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics, Math, Stanford University, 2005
Sources: [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-kaplan-645843213)

**Lesser-known facts:**
- PhD in physics from Harvard (2009); worked on quantum gravity and AdS/CFT before AI. [1](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-kaplan-645843213) [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kaplan)
- Met Dario Amodei in graduate school; they later shared an apartment in San Francisco. [1](https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kaplan-ai-safety-concerns-last-year-gain-traction-anthropic-2026-9)
- Trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. [1](https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kaplan-ai-safety-concerns-last-year-gain-traction-anthropic-2026-9)
- Got into physics wanting to build a faster-than-light drive, and was at first skeptical that AI was a big deal. [1](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ml-scaling-and-the-road-to-human-level-ai-anthropic-co-founder-jared-kaplan)
- Co-wrote "The Effective Field Theory of Inflation," an influential cosmology paper. [1](https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kaplan-ai-safety-concerns-last-year-gain-traction-anthropic-2026-9)
- Started researching machine learning in early 2018 while on the Johns Hopkins physics faculty, aiming to help make these systems safe. [1](https://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/directory/jared-kaplan/)
- Co-wrote the 2021 Codex paper, "Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code," with OpenAI researchers. [1](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KNr3vb4AAAAJ&hl=en)
- Decided in May 2025 that Claude Opus 4 needed AI Safety Level 3 protections after tests showed it could help amateurs with bioweapons. [1](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305824/jared-kaplan/)
- Told the Guardian humanity must decide by 2027 to 2030 whether to let AI recursively self-improve, calling it "the ultimate risk." [1](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/dec/02/jared-kaplan-artificial-intelligence-train-itself)

**Research papers before Anthropic:**
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020), author 5 of 31: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling (2020), author 2 of 19: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14701
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020), author 1 of 10: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361

**Interviews and talks:**
- [YC AI Startup School talk on scaling and the road to human-level AI (2025)](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ml-scaling-and-the-road-to-human-level-ai-anthropic-co-founder-jared-kaplan)
- [Simons Foundation lecture "Why Quantum Gravity Is Different" (2018)](https://www.simonsfoundation.org/people/jared-kaplan/)

**Known for:**
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020)
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020)
- A Natural Language for AdS/CFT Correlators (2011)
Sources: [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kaplan)

**Forbes estimate:** $15.5B as of 2026-10-18 (an estimate, not a disclosed holding). [1](https://www.forbes.com/profile/jared-kaplan/)

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