Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei was born in 1983 in San Francisco, California. His sister, Daniela, was born four years later. His father, Riccardo Amodei, an Italian-American leather craftsman from Massa Marittima, Tuscany, died of hepatitis C when Dario was 23 years old. His mother, Elena Engel, a Jewish American born in Chicago, worked as a project manager for libraries.

Dario grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Lowell High School. He was a member of the USA Physics Olympiad team in 2000. Amodei began college at Caltech, where he worked with Tom Tombrello as one of his Physics 11 students. He later transferred to Stanford University, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics. He was awarded the Hertz Foundation Fellowship in 2007 while earning his doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University. He later received the Hertz Thesis Prize in 2011 for his doctoral research on electrophysiology of neural circuits. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

From November 2014 until October 2015, he worked at Baidu. After that, he worked at Google Brain. In 2016, Amodei joined OpenAI. He worked on the development of GPT-2, GPT-3, and reinforcement learning from human feedback.

In 2021, Dario and his sister, Daniela, founded Anthropic along with five other former senior members of OpenAI including Jared Kaplan and Chris Olah. The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences. In November 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI approached Amodei about replacing Sam Altman and potentially merging the two startups. Amodei declined both offers.

Time magazine listed Amodei as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2025, and again in 2026 alongside his sister Daniela. He also was named as one of the "Architects of AI" for Time's Person of the Year.

As of May 2026, Anthropic has an estimated value of $965 billion, with Forbes estimating Amodei's net worth to be $15.5 billion.

In September 2026, Amodei called for the technology industry to slow the pace of AI development and said Anthropic would allow independent evaluators permanent access to its models to assess whether the company was following its safety commitments. In Anthropic's IPO financials and prospectus release, it was disclosed that Amodei's compensation package in 2025 tallied $18 million, including stocks. Their IPO is valued at $2 trillion as of October 2026.

Amodei began dating Camilla Clark in 2014 and married her in 2022.