SAN FRANCISCO — Daniela Amodei has an elusive energy that is warm, easy-going, and present. She ran into a sunny room on the first floor of Anthropic’s headquarters in December, sat down, and immediately apologized for the mug.
“Will having my giant novelty mug distract me?” she said. “I defer to the judgment of the wise photographer as to what is photographed.”
For someone operating at this level, it was a kind of normal thing that relieved anxiety.
Five years ago, she and her brother, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, led an exit from OpenAI.
They led a core group of senior researchers and launched Anthropic with the contrarian bet that safety and business success are not in tension, that the real money is not in viral consumer products, and that companies that know when to slow down will win the artificial intelligence race.
“It felt like we were running toward something rather than running away from something,” Daniela said of her decision to leave.
The co-founders have known each other for years, even before OpenAI. Her brothers and co-founders Tom Brown and Chris Oller google brain. Others were duplicated in different laboratories.
Anthropic’s headquarters are located in San Francisco’s “AI Alley,” a 230,000-square-foot glass skyscraper in the shadow of the city. sales force Tower. The district is a corridor for startups and tech giants that are reshaping America’s economy from a few blocks downtown.
Anthropic is currently valued at $183 billion and is on track to nearly double that amount, according to a newly signed term sheet. microsoft and Nvidia Join the cap table.
Revenue grew 10x annually for three consecutive years. This is largely due to the company’s AI assistant, Claude, becoming the model of choice for businesses that value reliability as well as functionality.
Almost in passing, Daniela Amodei said Claude once helped her diagnose a bacterial infection after multiple doctors had missed it.
Her human-scale here-and-now energy is almost the opposite of the AI founder archetype personified by OpenAI’s Sam Altman. tesla/xAI CEO Elon Musk.
Even her brother is a technological visionary who speaks to superintelligence in timelines and treats interviews like TED talks.
But Daniela Amodei is different.
If her brother is the one looking for his way to the horizon, she is the one pouring the foundations to get him there.
Anthropic vs. OpenAI
In November 2022, OpenAI fired the starting gun for the AI race. ChatGPT is a free chatbot that anyone can talk to, and it quickly went viral, reaching 100 million users in two months.
Google scrambled it. microsoft The entire technology industry has sprung into action.
But Antropic didn’t sprint.
From the beginning, Anthropic was defined by its contrarian stance towards OpenAI. That meant moving slowly, shipping later, and optimizing for trust.
While ChatGPT became a flashy consumer toy, Amodeis made another bet. They believed that the real money was not in the viral moment, but in building the less glamorous company behind it. It was included in APIs sold to Fortune 500 contracts, developer tools, and companies where reliability, security, and compliance are mission-critical.
“I can’t necessarily say we knew for sure,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC about the corporate bet. “As an organization, Anthropic is well-suited for B2B companies. We place great importance on things like reliability, security, and safety. It’s in our DNA.”
Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, said the AI frontier is shifting to real-world jobs that companies will actually pay for, such as coding, math and science.
“Frontier is not about making chat better,” he said, pointing to Anthropic’s strength for developers. Claude has built a reputation as a top-level programming model, outperforming its major rivals in many users’ workflows.
Even back in 2020, Daniela Amodei said her team could see a future where Claude handles many of the highly intelligent tasks that humans do in the workplace. “And we thought this was a pretty big market.”
Anthropic says its corporate customer base has grown from less than 1,000 to more than 300,000 in two years, and nearly 80% of Claude’s activity now comes from outside the United States.
A customer list is like a profile of a global company. novo nordiskthe world’s largest Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, as well as Bridgewater, Stripe and Slack manage Claude at scale.
Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Ventures, which invested in Anthropic, said the bet made sense for a simple reason. That means business customers don’t cancel like consumers.
“We really like their focus. Frankly, we knew Anthropic’s focus on safety and trust would work very well with enterprise buyers, and that’s proven to be true.”
OpenAI still leads in size and culture, and ChatGPT is a well-known company with nearly 900 million weekly active users, but Anthropic is rapidly closing the gap and is already ahead in some areas.
Currently, Anthropic’s revenue is approximately 85% business. OpenAI is over 60% consumer.
“One of the values and things we talk about a lot internally is how not to believe the hype,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC. “For us, it’s never about getting attention or being in the headlines. We’re really here to do the job.”
“As Anthropic goes, so does generative AI,” said Alex Kantrowitz, founder of independent publication Big Technology. “They’re making the purest bet that this technology will work. If Anthropic can make it work, GenAI will all work. And if they don’t, they’re going to have some serious problems.”
Anthropic’s lead in enterprise has proven durable. And that’s the lead the Amodei brothers have built together.
“It’s a real honor to run Anthropic with my brothers,” Daniela Amodei said. “We’ve known each other all our lives, or at least my whole life. He went four years without me, poor guy.”
“Dario and I really support each other,” she added. “He’s great at pushing me to think about the big picture…helping me think about things like how can we build an organization that is lasting, sustainable, and filled with great people who really want to do the type of work we set out to do five years ago.”
Amodei says there’s always more work to be done, and models are getting smarter by leaps and bounds.
She framed this as a lesson from the last generation of technology. If social media companies had gone back in time and known what their platforms could unleash, would they have done anything differently?
Anthropic is now trying to answer that question, she said, by “talking about the risks and trying to mitigate them while we can.”
Daniela Amodei is betting it can be done. She has built an entire company around that belief.
Watch the video to learn more.
