Artificial Intelligence1 min read

Meet the seven co-founders of Anthropic

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

Sibling leaders Dario and Daniela Amodei departed OpenAI alongside five former colleagues out of concern that artificial intelligence capabilities were rapidly outpacing human understanding. The founding team includes four researchers, an engineer, a former journalist, and a public policymaker who prioritized safe development over commercial pursuits. Under the targeted public offering price of $70 to $78 per share, each co-founder's stake of approximately 240,000,000 class A shares could reach up to $18 billion.

Key points

  • The seven co-founders collectively own about 10% of the firm ahead of its historic market…: The seven co-founders collectively own about 10% of the firm ahead of its historic market debut.
  • Disagreements surrounding commercialization and AI safety directly spurred the departure…: Disagreements surrounding commercialization and AI safety directly spurred the departure of key leaders from OpenAI in 2021.
  • Public trading is projected to begin on Nov. 19 with a company valuation target approachi…: Public trading is projected to begin on Nov. 19 with a company valuation target approaching $1.4 trillion.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Four researchers, a former journalist, a public policymaker, and an engineer founded Anthropic in 2021. Six years later, the artificial intelligence company is about to go public, with trading expected to begin on Nov. 19, in what will be one of the biggest IPOs on record.

Those seven co-founders are poised to each be worth many billions of dollars.

It all started with a defection.

At the end of 2020, siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei were vice presidents at OpenAI, the company that kicked off the generative AI frenzy with the launch of ChatGPT. But the two had grown frustrated with their employer over its approach to AI safety. Fearing a world where AI models' capabilities would progress faster than our understanding of them, the duo launched Anthropic early the next year.

They took a handful of OpenAI colleagues with them: Tom Brown, the company's research engineering lead on GPT-3; Jack Clark, a policy director; Jared Kaplan, a contract research consultant; and Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah, both members of OpenAI's technical staff.

They were all deeply concerned about OpenAI's…

Artificial Intelligence