Anthropic’s Amodei siblings may hold the key to generative AI

SAN FRANCISCO — Daniela Amodei has an energy that is difficult to place – warm, unhurried, immediately present. She entered a sunny room on the ground floor of Anthropicin December, sat down and immediately apologized for her cup.

“Will my gigantic novelty mug distract me if I have it?” she said. “I leave it to the wise cameramen when it comes to photography.”

It was a sort of disarming normalcy for someone operating at that level.

Five years ago, she and her brother, CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodeiled an exodus of OpenAI.

They took a group of experienced researchers and launched Anthropic with a contrarian bet: that safety and commercial success were not in tension, that the real money was not in viral consumer products, and that the artificial intelligence the race would be won by the company that knew when to slow down.

“It definitely felt more like we were running toward something than running away from something,” Daniela said of the decision to leave.

The co-founders had known each other for years before OpenAI. His brother and co-founders Tom Brown and Chris Olah worked together at Google Brain. Others overlapped in various laboratories.

Anthropic’s headquarters is on “AI Alley” in San Francisco, a 230,000 square foot glass skyscraper in the shadow of Sales force Round. The neighborhood is a corridor of startups and tech giants reshaping the American economy from a handful of downtown blocks.

Anthropic is now valued at $183 billion and is on track to nearly double that amount, according to a recently signed term sheet, with Microsoft And Nvidia join its capitalization table.

Revenue has grown ten times a year for three years in a row, largely because the company’s AI assistant, Claude, has become the model of choice for companies that care as much about reliability as capacity.

Daniela Amodei mentioned, almost in passing, that Claude once helped her diagnose a bacterial infection after several doctors missed it.

With her human-scale, here-and-now energy, she is in many ways the opposite of the AI ​​founder archetype personified by OpenAI. Sam Altman And Tesla/CEO of xAI Elon Musk.

Even his brother is a version of the technical visionary who talks in terms of timelines to superintelligence and treats interviews like TED talks.

But Daniela Amodei is different.

If it is her brother who is looking for a path to the horizon, she is laying the foundations that will allow him to get there.

Google scrambled. Microsoft went all in. The entire tech industry has been in motion.

But Anthropic didn’t sprint.

From the start, Anthropic has been defined by a contrarian posture toward OpenAI: move slower, ship later, and optimize for trust.

While ChatGPT has become a flashy consumer toy, the Amodeis have made a different bet. They believed the real money lay not in the viral moments, but in the less glamorous business creation behind them. These were Fortune 500 contracts, developer tools, and APIs sold to companies where reliability, security, and compliance are mission-critical.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say we were sure,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC of the company’s bet. “Anthropic, as an organization, is well suited to be a B2B company. We really care about things like reliability, security and safety. It’s part of our DNA.”

Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, said the AI ​​frontier has shifted toward the actual work — coding, math, science — that companies will actually pay for.

“The frontier is not about making our chat better,” he said, emphasizing Anthropic’s strength among developers, where Claude has built a reputation as a leading programming model, beating out major competitors in many users’ workflows.

Even in 2020, Daniela Amodei said the team could see a future in which 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 his professional clientele grew from fewer than 1,000 to more than 300,000 in two years, and nearly 80% of Claude’s business now comes from outside the United States.

THE customer list reads like a who’s who of global business, with Novo Nordiskthe Norwegian sovereign wealth fund – the largest in the world – as well as Bridgewater, Stripe and Slack, all of which manage Claude at scale.

Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Ventures who invested in Anthropic, said the bet made sense for a simple reason: Enterprise customers don’t churn like consumers do.

“We really like the emphasis that they put, and frankly, Anthropic’s emphasis on security and trust, we knew that was going to play really well with the enterprise buyer, and it’s proven to be true.”

While OpenAI still leads in scale and cultural cachet, with ChatGPT a household name boasting nearly 900 million weekly active users, Anthropic is quickly closing the gap – and is already ahead in some areas.

Today, Anthropic’s revenue represents about 85% of its business. OpenAI is more than 60% consumer.

“One of the values ​​and things that we talk about a lot internally is how to not believe the hype,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC. “For us, it’s never been about getting attention or making headlines. We’re really here to get the job done.”

“Generative AI goes hand in hand with Anthropic,” said Alex Kantrowitz, founder of independent publication Big Technology. “They have the purest bet on how this technology will work. If Anthropic can make it work, all of GenAI will work. And if not, we’ll be in serious trouble.”

Anthropic’s corporate lead is proving durable. And it’s a track that the Amodei siblings built together.

“It is truly a privilege to lead Anthropic with my brother,” said Daniela Amodei. “We’ve known each other forever, or at least my whole life. He spent four years without me, poor guy.”

“Dario and I really help each other,” she added. “He’s great at pushing me to think about the big picture…I’m good at thinking about how we can build an organization that’s sustainable, that’s filled with great people who really want to do the type of work we set out to do five years ago.”

There is always more work to be done, Amodei said, and the models are getting smarter.

She presented it as a lesson from the latest generation of technology: If social media companies could have gone back in time, knowing what their platforms would release, would they have done things differently?

Anthropic, she said, is trying to answer that question now: “talking about the risks and trying to mitigate them” while it still can.

Daniela Amodei bets yes. She built her entire business around this belief.

Watch the video to find out more.