Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei grew up in San Francisco’s Mission district with her brother Dario Amodei, who is five years older, and attended Lowell High School in San Francisco.⁠[1]

She studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating in 2009.⁠[2]

She earned a bachelor’s degree combining English literature, politics and music and had a partial music scholarship as a classical flutist.⁠[3]

After graduating she worked in international development and global health, including at Conservation Through Public Health, a nongovernmental organization based in Uganda.⁠[3]

She also worked as a congressional staffer and later said Capitol Hill work was “extremely not for me.”⁠[4]

She worked on Matt Cartwright’s 2012 congressional campaign in Pennsylvania, handling all field activities, and in January 2013 was listed as scheduler in the newly elected Representative’s office, described as a San Francisco native who attended UC Santa Cruz.⁠[5]

In 2013 she joined Stripe as a founding recruiter.⁠[6]

Reporting on Anthropic’s prospectus listed her previous Stripe role as head of risk operations; she left the company in 2018.⁠[7]

Open Philanthropy’s March 2017 grant disclosure stated that Holden Karnofsky was engaged to Daniela, the sister of Dario Amodei.⁠[8]

She married Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, in 2017.⁠[1]

She joined OpenAI in 2018, first as an engineering manager and vice president of people, and later led safety and policy work.⁠[9]

In December 2020 she left OpenAI with her brother Dario Amodei and other colleagues to start a new company.⁠[10]

In 2021 she and six other former OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei, founded Anthropic, with Dario as chief executive and Daniela as president.⁠[6]

In September 2023 she said, “I oversee the majority of the day-to-day management of the company.”⁠[11]

That month she and Dario Amodei were named together to TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.⁠[12]

She ranked No. 94 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list in 2024.⁠[9]

In 2025 she rose to No. 48 on the list.⁠[13]

In 2026 she ranked No. 22; Fortune credited her reputation on safety with helping Anthropic through its conflict with the Pentagon.⁠[14]

In January 2025 her husband, Holden Karnofsky, joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff working on its Responsible Scaling Policy.⁠[15]

In December 2025 she told Fortune, “I have probably been the leader who’s been the most skeptical and scared of the rate at which we’re growing.”⁠[16]

In January 2026 a pledge by Anthropic’s seven co-founders to give away 80 percent of their wealth was made public; ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry then estimated each co-founder’s net worth at about $3.7 billion.⁠[17]

On February 13, 2026, Anthropic announced that Chris Liddell had joined its board, quoting her as co-founder and president on his judgment and experience.⁠[18]

Anthropic subsequently refused Pentagon demands to drop safeguards and allow “any lawful use,” after which Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology; this was a company-level dispute.⁠[10]

At Bloomberg Tech on June 4, 2026, she responded to doubts about AI returns, saying frontier models involve large upfront training and inference costs suited to public-market capital, and that Anthropic prefers demand slightly exceeding its compute.⁠[19]

In a talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business that month she called herself a “generalist,” spoke of a “radical responsibility” for Anthropic’s technology and said she has two young children.⁠[2]

In a conversation recorded for a health conference she called using AI as a romantic companion “a terrible use of AI” and said people should not do it.⁠[20]

On October 26, 2026, Anthropic filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC for a proposed listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT; the filing was not yet effective and the share count and price range had not been set.⁠[21]

The prospectus describes her as “President and Chairperson of our board of directors” and states that the seven co-founders will be the initial members of a Founder LLC holding one Class F share with 50.1 percent of total voting power but no economic rights.⁠[22]

Fortune noted that the prospectus describes the co-founders’ pledges to give 80 percent of their personal equity to philanthropy as voluntary and revocable rather than legally binding.⁠[23]

The Associated Press reported that Anthropic planned a November debut, gave her age as 39, and said the filing did not directly state ownership stakes.⁠[24]

The post-IPO board is chaired by her and includes Dario Amodei, Reed Hastings, Christopher Liddell, Vas Narasimhan and Yasmin Razavi, with the Long-Term Benefit Trust electing a majority of directors.⁠[25]

As of October 28, 2026, Forbes estimated her net worth at about $13.7 billion, based on a roughly 1.4 percent stake at Anthropic’s $965 billion valuation from May 2026.⁠[6]