Current Labs & Applied AI

Dario Amodei

Co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leading safety research at OpenAI, betting that safety and capability research need to happen inside the same lab building frontier models.

Dario Amodei led safety-focused research at OpenAI, including early work on scaling laws — the empirical finding that a model's performance improves predictably as a smooth function of parameters, data, and compute, which became a central argument for why scale itself was worth pursuing aggressively. In 2021, alongside his sister Daniela Amodei and several other OpenAI researchers, he co-founded Anthropic, built around the premise that AI safety research is most effective when done by a team also building and shipping frontier models, rather than studied at arm's length from labs racing ahead on capability alone.

As Anthropic's CEO, Amodei has pushed RLHF-style alignment techniques and interpretability research (trying to understand what's actually happening inside a trained model, not just how it behaves at the input-output level) as core research priorities alongside model capability, developing the Claude family of models. He has written extensively and publicly about both the transformative potential of powerful AI and the risks of getting safety wrong at frontier scale, positioning Anthropic's mission explicitly around that tension rather than treating it as a side concern.

See also: Daniela Amodei

Learn more: AI Safety & Alignment · Wikipedia: Dario Amodei