Years before she became president of a company reportedly eyeing a $2 trillion IPO, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, the sister of CEO Dario Amodei, was running workplace problems past a panel of stuffed animals.
A piece published Wednesday in the Atlantic, adapted from journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, explains that Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei and her husband, Effective Altruism kingpin Holden Karnofsky, kept what they called a “personal advisory council” made up of stuffed animals, each with an assigned character profile, to help work through office dilemmas. The habit started before Anthropic existed, while both were working at OpenAI.
The council had its own cast. Jinji was a lazy cat who encouraged Daniela to cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work. Maura, a pink bear, was a detail-oriented, type-A manager. Beary Bonds, a panda, was patron bear of generosity and empathy. Amodei told Roose in 2023 that the toys were very useful in analyzing different personality types. Few people at OpenAI knew the council existed, and those who did weren’t sure how seriously she actually took its advice.
Daniela Amodei joined OpenAI in 2018 after studying English literature rather than coming up through a conventional tech path. Some colleagues there saw her as the more emotionally attuned of the two Amodei siblings, a reputation that reportedly shaped her role as her responsibilities grew to include managing technical teams, while Karnofsky sat on OpenAI’s nonprofit board. She also had friction with two other high-profile figures at the company, co-founder Greg Brockman and then-executive Mira Murati, despite the fact that Brockman had given a toast at Daniela and Karnofsky’s wedding in 2017.
Meanwhile, her brother Dario Amodei was growing distrustful of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and of Brockman, and began weighing an exit with other researchers focused on AI safety. The siblings became the center of what colleagues referred to as “Dario’s clique,” complete with private Slack channels and separate meetings dedicated to safety concerns. By 2020, Dario was recruiting people to leave with him and start a new company built around that mission. Daniela took the lead on negotiating the split with OpenAI, a process insiders nicknamed “the divorce.”
The siblings departed in December 2020 and founded Anthropic along with five others: Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan. Ben Mann joined later as an eighth co-founder. The company started out as a roughly 50-person AI safety research lab. It has since grown to thousands of employees, with Daniela Amodei now serving as president and board chair, overseeing research, engineering, product, governance and commercial operations. Karnofsky, according to a photo caption in the report, later joined Anthropic’s technical staff.
Anthropic has been at the center of a push for an organized slowdown of AI development and government regulation of the technology. Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow explained during a recent speech that “They are building a cartel right in front of your face, and they’re pretending like they’re the altruist in the process:”
“Amodei proposed a group called METR, which is a Berkeley-based group,” the host of The Alex Marlow Show explained. “One of the most recognizable names in METR is a guy named Holden Karnofsky.”
Marlow then noted that Karnofsky so happens to be “married to someone named Daniela Amodei, who is the co-founder of Anthropic with her brother.”
“So, Dario’s solution to the deadly AI that he created is to appoint a group tied to his own family,” Marlow said, eliciting laughter from audience members.
“Dario Amodei wants an AI regulator controlled by Dario Amodei and Dario’s sister, so they can create the framework under which all of us operate,” he added.
Marlow warned that “the reason these guys want regulation” is because they are after “power and market capture.”
“They’re not interested in saving humanity,” the editor-in-chief continued. “They want to use AI to be able to leverage market capture and, God forbid, create these international bodies that will control more of your lives.”
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump recognizes. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Atlantic here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.