Daniela Amodei

• 1. Introduction

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  Daniela Amodei enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz on a classical flute scholarship. She left with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature. Those facts sit in sharp contrast to how she is now known. She is the president of Anthropic, a company at the center of the global conversation about artificial intelligence. How a musician and literature student arrived at that position is the question this documentary follows. The answer starts not in a laboratory but in a San Francisco household.

• 2. The Amodei Household

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  Riccardo Amodei, Daniela's father, was an Italian American leather craftsman whose roots lay in Massa Marittima, a town in Tuscany. He died while Daniela was still a young adult, after years of health problems. Her mother, Elena Engel, was a Jewish American born in Chicago who worked as a project manager for libraries. The household brought together two distinct immigrant traditions, one rooted in craft and one in public service. Daniela was born in 1987 and grew up in San Francisco as the younger sister of Dario Amodei. She graduated from Lowell High School. The graduation eventually took her away from San Francisco, toward a career that would begin, unexpectedly, in political offices on the East Coast.

• 3. From Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley

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  Matt Cartwright, a House Representative for Pennsylvania, briefly had Amodei managing his communications office in Washington, D.C. She had arrived there after playing a role in a successful congressional campaign in Pennsylvania. Both positions were part of an early career spent across global health and politics. She then left for the technology industry. In 2013, she joined Stripe as an early employee. Stripe was a financial services company, and Amodei was among its early team members. In 2018, she moved again, this time to OpenAI. Her new role would bring her close to some of the most consequential decisions in artificial intelligence research.

• 4. Safety as a Calling

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  Amodei was managing the team at OpenAI that developed GPT-2. OpenAI chose to release the model gradually, holding back certain versions over concerns about misuse. She later moved into the role of vice president of safety and policy at OpenAI. That position placed her among the most senior people in the field working explicitly on questions of AI risk. In 2020, she left the organization. In 2021, she co-founded Anthropic alongside her brother Dario and several colleagues. The company was built with safety as a core commitment from the start. As its president, Amodei leads the teams working on AI safety and model alignment. Anthropic went on to develop the Claude series of large language models. In September 2023, Daniela and Dario were both named among the Time 100 Most Influential People in AI.

• 5. Beyond the Laboratory

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  In August 2017, Daniela married Holden Karnofsky. Karnofsky co-founded Coefficient Giving, a foundation formerly known as Open Philanthropy and operating within the effective altruism tradition. They have a son. Forbes estimated Amodei's net worth at $7 billion. The effective altruism principles at Coefficient Giving and the AI safety work at Anthropic represent two approaches to the same underlying concern.