Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei’s early career spanned political campaigns, tech recruiting, and trust and safety before a pivot that would make the now 37-year-old one of the few female leaders in the booming field of generative AI. The Italian American joined OpenAI in 2018, serving first as engineering manager and vice president of people and then as senior vice president of safety and policy. She left the ChatGPT developer three years later as she, her brother Dario, and five other former OpenAI researchers founded the safety-first AI startup Anthropic in 2021. Now Amodei is president of the startup that’s focused on building AI that is both reliable and safe—concerns that have clouded the rapid AI boom amid hallucinated outputs and rampant deepfakes. Anthropic says its core product, the large language model called Claude, does not train on personal data without a user’s clear permission and is guided by an ethical framework that aims to reduce harmful or made-up answers. The startup has attracted billions in funding, including a $4 billion investment from Amazon, giving it a reported valuation of more than $18 billion. Anthropic has kept its cool amid growing public scrutiny about the possibly catastrophic consequences of unchecked AI systems. As California lawmakers sought to rein in the homegrown Silicon Valley tech, Anthropic provided key feedback on the highly contested bill that would require the biggest AI firms to implement and act on safety testing. In the past year, Anthropic has launched its chatbot in Europe, Canada, and Brazil. Anthropic also unveiled its enterprise subscription plan, which aims to bring Claude to corporate customers. “The pace of progress is incredibly fast,” Amodei told Fortune earlier this year, adding that she doesn’t expect AI companies’ rapid growth to slow down anytime soon.