Jared Kaplan

Jared Kaplan graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in the class of 2001.⁠[1]

In 2005 he was named a Hertz Fellow by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.⁠[2]

The same year he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

In 2009 he received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry with a dissertation titled “Aspects of holography,” advised by Nima Arkani-Hamed.⁠[4]

After a postdoctoral position at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, he joined Johns Hopkins in 2013 as an assistant professor of particle physics and was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2014.⁠[3]

In 2015 he received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which helps fund his research in conformal field theory.⁠[5]

He left physics in 2019, saying he had concluded that “AI was going to make progress faster than almost any field in science.”⁠[6]

In January 2020 he was the first author of “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models,” posted on arXiv with co-authors including Sam McCandlish and Dario AmodeiDario AmodeiDario Amodei is an artificial intelligence researcher and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic. Trained in physics and biophysics, he conducted research at Baidu, Google Brain, and OpenAI, where he led research including work on GPT-2 and GPT-3. His career spans large-model development, AI safety, interpretability, and public policy.Open the full entry; its abstract opens, “We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss.”⁠[7]

He was previously a researcher at OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, which he left in 2020.⁠[8]

He was the fifth of 31 authors on the GPT-3 paper, “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” released in May 2020.⁠[9]

In 2021 he co-founded the artificial intelligence company Anthropic with six other former OpenAI employees.⁠[10]

At Anthropic he helped pioneer Constitutional AI.⁠[2]

He has stated that since 2023 he has been Anthropic’s Chief Science Officer, overseeing model development and safety research.⁠[11]

In October 2024, announcing its updated Responsible Scaling Policy, Anthropic said he would succeed co-founder and chief technology officer Sam McCandlish as its Responsible Scaling Officer.⁠[12]

As responsible scaling officer, he decided to release Claude 4 under AI Safety Level 3 safeguards after internal tests suggested it could provide uplift toward bioweapons.⁠[13]

In August 2025 he was named 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 list of the 100 most influential people in AI for 2025.⁠[13]

In June 2025, at TechCrunch Sessions: AI at UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, he discussed Anthropic’s decision to cut Windsurf’s direct access to Claude amid reports that OpenAI was acquiring the company, saying, “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”⁠[14]

In December 2025 he said humanity must decide by 2030 whether to accept the “ultimate risk” of allowing AI systems to train themselves.⁠[15]

He said the decision could come as early as 2027, described the process as one that “sounds like a kind of scary process,” and predicted that AI could do most white-collar work within two to three years.⁠[16]

In January 2026 he said there was “a 50% chance that in two or three years, theoretical physicists will mostly be replaced with AI.”⁠[6]

In February 2026, as Anthropic dropped the pledge in its Responsible Scaling Policy to pause training, he explained, “We felt that it wouldn’t actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” arguing that unilateral pauses would not help and denying that the change was a reversal.⁠[17]

He filed a declaration in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Department of War describing the two usage exceptions it refused to drop: “mass surveillance of Americans and lethal autonomous warfare.”⁠[11]

In August 2026 Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk was “unlawful retaliation.”⁠[18]

In September 2026, in a separate case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the supply-chain risk designation.⁠[19]

In April 2026 he said Claude Mythos was Anthropic’s first model with “very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities,” which had emerged rather than being specifically trained.⁠[20]

In May 2026 the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy gave him its Alumni Trailblazer Award, noting that “Jared Kaplan serves as the Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of Anthropic.”⁠[1]

On October 26, 2026, Anthropic officially filed to go public under the proposed ticker ANT; he is one of the seven co-founders who are members of the Founder LLC holding its Class F share.⁠[21]

That Class F share carries 50.1 percent of the voting power, and each founder has one vote.⁠[22]

The prospectus lists him as a selling stockholder beneficially owning 242,351,170 shares, about 1.4 percent; each co-founder pledged to give 80 percent of their personal Anthropic equity to charity, which the filing calls “voluntary, revocable expressions of each cofounder’s philanthropic intent and do not constitute legally binding obligations.”⁠[23]

As of October 30, 2026, 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 estimated his net worth at about $13.7 billion.⁠[10]

Johns Hopkins lists him as an associate professor whose research interests are quantum gravity, conformal field theory and machine learning.⁠[24]

He is a principal investigator in the Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap.⁠[25]