Anthropic’s Amodei siblings may hold the key to generative AI
SAN FRANCISCO — Daniela Amodei has an energy that’s hard to describe; warm, unhurried, instantly available. In December, he walked into a sunny room on the ground floor of Anthropic’s headquarters, sat down, and immediately apologized for his mug.
“Will my giant novelty cup distract me if I have it?” he said. “I will seek the wisdom of the cameramen as to what happened in the shot.”
For someone operating at this level, this was disarmingly normal.
Five years ago he and his brother, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, led the breakout from OpenAI.
They took a core group of senior researchers and launched Anthropic with a contrarian claim: that security and business success are not in tension, that the real money is not in viral consumer products, and that the AI race will be made by the company that knows when to slow down.
“We really felt like we were running towards something rather than running away from something,” Daniela said of her decision to leave.
The co-founders knew each other years before OpenAI. His brother and co-founders Tom Brown and Chris Olah, Google Brain. Others overlapped in various laboratories.
Anthropic is headquartered in San Francisco’s “AI Alley,” a 230,000-square-foot glass high-rise in its shadow. sales force Tower. From a few blocks downtown, the neighborhood is a corridor of startups and tech giants reshaping the American economy.
According to the newly signed term sheet, Anthropic’s value is now $183 billion and is on track to almost double that figure. Microsoft And Nvidia joins the cap table.
Revenues have grown tenfold annually for three consecutive years, as the company’s AI assistant Claude has become the model of choice for businesses that value reliability as much as talent.
Daniela Amodei said almost in passing that Claude helped diagnose a bacterial infection that more than one doctor had missed.
With his human-scale, here-and-now energy, he is in many ways the opposite of the AI founder archetype personified by OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Tesla’s/xAI CEO Elon Musk.
Even his brother is a version of the technical visionary who talks in super-intelligent timelines and treats interviews like TED talks.
But Daniela Amodei is different.
If it is his brother who is looking for the way to the horizon, he is laying the foundation that will enable him to get there.
Anthropic and OpenAI
In November 2022, OpenAI fired the starting gun of the AI race. ChatGPT, a free chatbot that anyone can talk to, went viral instantly and reached 100 million users in two months.
Google got it mixed up. Microsoft The entire tech industry jumped into action.
However, Antropik did not run.
From the beginning, Anthropic has been defined by a contrarian stance against OpenAI: Move slower, ship later, and optimize for trust.
While ChatGPT has become a flashy consumer toy, Amodeis has made a different bet. They believed that the real money was not in the viral moments but in the less flashy venture structures behind them. It included Fortune 500 contracts, developer tools, and APIs sold to companies where reliability, security, and compliance were critical.
“I can’t say we know for sure,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC about corporate betting. “As an organization, Anthropic is well-suited to being a B2B company. We really care about things like reliability, safety and security. It’s engraved in our DNA.”
Gil Luria, an analyst at District Attorney Davidson, said the AI frontier is shifting toward real work — coding, math, science — that companies will actually pay for.
“The limit isn’t making our conversation better,” he said, noting Anthropic’s strength among developers; here Claude has gained a reputation as a high-level programming model, outperforming its key competitors in many users’ workflows.
Daniela Amodei said that even in 2020, the team could see a future where Claude would take on many of the high-intelligence tasks that humans do at work. “And we thought that was a pretty big market.”
Anthropic said its commercial customer base has grown from less than 1,000 to more than 300,000 in two years, and nearly 80% of Claude’s activity now comes from outside the United States.
customer list It reads like a who’s who of global enterprise, Novo NordiskThe Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, plus Bridgewater, Stripe and Slack all run Claude at scale.
Sameer Dholakia, partner at Bessemer Ventures, which invested in Anthropic, said this bet makes sense for a simple reason: enterprise customers don’t quit like consumers.
“We really like the focus they have, and obviously Anthropic’s focus on security and trust, we knew it would perform really well with the enterprise buyer, and that has proven to be true.”
While OpenAI still leads in terms of scale and culture, with ChatGPT having nearly 900 million weekly active users, Anthropic is quickly closing the gap and is already ahead in some areas.
Today, roughly 85% of Anthropic’s revenue is commercial. More than 60% of OpenAI is consumer.
“One of the values and one of the things we talk about a lot internally is how not to believe these hypes,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC. “For us, it’s never been about getting attention or making headlines. We’re really here to do the job.”
“As anthropology goes, so goes generative AI,” said Alex Kantrowitz, founder of the independent publication Big Technology. “They have the purest bet that this technology works. If Anthropic can pull it off, all GenAI will work. And if it doesn’t, we’re going to have some serious problems.”
Anthropic’s leadership in the enterprise space proves solid. And this is a clue that the Amodei brothers created together.
“It is truly a privilege to run Anthropic with my brother,” said Daniela Amodei. “We’ve known each other all our lives – or at least my whole life. He spent four years without me, poor guy.”
“Dario and I really help each other,” he added. “He’s great at pushing me to think about the big picture… helping me think about things like, how can we build a lasting, sustainable organization full of great people who really want to do the work we set out to do five years ago?”
Amodei said there is always more work to be done and models are getting exponentially smarter.
He framed this as a lesson from the last generation of technology: If social media companies could go back in time knowing what their platforms would reveal, would they have done anything differently?
He said Anthropic is now trying to answer that question while it’s still possible to “talk about the risks and try to mitigate them.”
Daniela Amodei is betting she can do it. He built his entire company on this belief.
Watch the video to learn more.
