Dario Amodei

CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. Former VP of Research at OpenAI. Background in physics (undergrad) and biophysics (PhD). One of the earliest advocates of the scaling hypothesis, first observing it during speech recognition work at Baidu under Andrew Ng in 2014.

Background

Joined AI research at Baidu (2014) under Andrew Ng, working on speech recognition with recurrent neural networks. Became convinced of scaling laws through direct experimentation. Moved to OpenAI, where he worked as VP of Research. Left in 2021 with Daniela Amodei and others to co-found Anthropic, whose mission is the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Author of the essay Machines of Loving Grace (2024), which argues that powerful AI could compress decades of scientific and economic progress.

Appearances in this wiki

Key positions

• The scaling hypothesis will continue to hold; inductive inference across 10 years of evidence is sufficient prior
• ASL framework: if-then capability-triggered safety commitments are the right regulatory structure — for industry self-governance and external regulation alike
• Two AI risk categories: catastrophic misuse (near-term, manageable with filters) and model autonomy (longer-term, requires interpretability)
• Race to the Top: Anthropic’s competitive strategy is to raise the safety floor for the whole industry, not to win by being uniquely responsible