Amodei was born in San Francisco in 1983, graduated from Lowell High School and was on the USA Physics Olympiad team in 2000. He began college at Caltech, transferred to Stanford University for a bachelor's degree in physics and earned a doctorate in biophysics at Princeton University, where his research on the electrophysiology of neural circuits won the Hertz Thesis Prize in 2011. He was then a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Amodei moved into machine learning at Baidu, where he worked from November 2014 to October 2015, and then at Google Brain. He joined OpenAI in 2016 and became its vice president of research, working on GPT-2, GPT-3 and reinforcement learning from human feedback, which Forbes says he co-invented. In 2021 he, his sister Daniela and five other senior OpenAI staff, including Jared Kaplan and Chris Olah, left over differences about the company's direction and founded Anthropic. Daniela Amodei is its president.
Amodei has built Anthropic around AI safety and has put the probability of catastrophic harm from AI at 10–25%. He set out his views in the essays "Machines of Loving Grace" (October 2024) and "The Adolescence of Technology" (January 2026). In November 2023 OpenAI's board approached him about replacing Sam Altman and merging the two companies; he declined both. In February 2026 he refused a Department of Defense request to drop Anthropic's ban on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons; the department labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and in March a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against it.
On September 12, 2026, Amodei called on the frontier labs to slow AI development together, an essay Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the same day. Private investors valued Anthropic at $965 billion in May 2026; it is now seeking about $2 trillion in a public listing. At an investor day on October 14, Amodei reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion and a profit on an adjusted basis. Anthropic's filing shows he received $18 million for 2025, mostly stock and options, and that his base salary doubled to $1.4 million in July.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
