Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei (born 1987) is an American technology executive who cofounded and serves as president of Anthropic, where she runs the company's operations, hiring, finance, legal, and policy functions. The younger sister of chief executive Dario Amodei, she built operations and people organizations at Stripe and OpenAI before the siblings left OpenAI to start the company in 2021. She is married to Holden Karnofsky, cofounder of Open Philanthropy, an early Anthropic funder from the Effective Altruism movement.¹²

Background and Early Career

Amodei was born in San Francisco, four years after her brother, to an Italian-American father and a Jewish-American mother. She took a bachelor's degree in English literature with a politics minor from the University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating in 2009, and began her career outside technology, including work as a congressional campaign staffer and at a global-health nonprofit. She joined the payments company Stripe as an early employee around 2013, where she worked in risk and operations and grew teams as the company scaled.¹³

In 2018 Amodei moved to OpenAI, where she held senior operations and people roles and became vice president of safety and policy, overseeing the organization's recruiting, human resources, and parts of its policy and safety work during the period her brother led research. Profiles describe her as having run the "people" and operational side of OpenAI while Dario ran the technical side, the division of labor the two later reproduced at their own company.²³

Anthropic

When Dario and a group of OpenAI colleagues resigned in late 2020 over disagreements about the company's direction and safety posture, Daniela left with them, and the siblings incorporated Anthropic in early 2021 as a public-benefit corporation. As president she owns the non-research surface of the company: finance, legal, human resources, communications, policy, and the operational scaling of a firm that grew from a few dozen people to thousands within a few years. She and Dario were jointly named to the inaugural Time 100 AI list in 2023, and the firm's rising valuation made her one of the wealthiest self-made women in technology, with Forbes estimating her stake in the billions of dollars.¹⁴

Anthropic drew much of its early capital from the effective-altruism world. Open Philanthropy, cofounded by her husband, was an early funder; in 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried invested roughly 500 million dollars through Alameda Research months before FTX collapsed; and later rounds drew Amazon and Google. Both Amodeis have publicly distanced themselves from the effective-altruism label even as critics noted the density of the ties, and Dario has said the company kept Bankman-Fried off the board and limited him to non-voting shares.²⁵

Governance and the Long-Term Benefit Trust

Amodei oversaw the construction of Anthropic's unusual governance, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, formally established in September 2023 and holding a special class of stock that lets a body of trustees insulated from shareholders elect and remove a growing share of the board over time, an arrangement intended to weight safety over investor returns. The structure echoed the nonprofit-control design that produced OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, and as president she manages the relationship between that trust, the board, and the company's commercial investors.⁶⁷

Amodei married Holden Karnofsky in August 2017 in a ceremony its guests later described as effective-altruism themed, and the two had earlier lived in a shared house with figures from the Rationalist Community and the early effective-altruism scene, in which Karnofsky and Dario were among the housemates. Karnofsky co-led Open Philanthropy, the largest sustained funder of AI-safety work, before taking a leave to focus on AI strategy and joining Anthropic in January 2025 to work on the company's responsible-scaling and safety policies. He had previously held an OpenAI board seat tied to a 2017 Open Philanthropy grant, which he resigned in 2021 after his wife cofounded the competing lab.⁸⁹