Tech

Dario Amodei

A physicist turned AI researcher; left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic with his sister.

Born: 1983 · San Francisco, California, US
Roots: Italian-American father from Tuscany; Jewish American mother from Chicago
Family: Middle class; Leather-craftsman father who died when Dario was a young adult; mother a project manager for libraries.
Education: Caltech → Stanford (physics) → Princeton (PhD, biophysics)
Started with: $124M raised; Anthropic's 2021 Series A, led by Jaan Tallinn.
Affiliations & societies: None documented.; Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.

The pathway

2000 · age 17
US Physics Olympiad team
While at Lowell High School, a public magnet school in San Francisco.
2006 · age 23
Physics degree at Stanford
After starting at Caltech and transferring.
2011 · age 28
PhD at Princeton
Biophysics, on a Hertz Foundation fellowship.
2014 · age 31
Baidu, then Google Brain
Works on speech recognition under Andrew Ng; moves to Google the following year.
2016 · age 33
Joins OpenAI
Becomes VP of Research; leads work on GPT-2 and GPT-3.
2021 · age 38
Co-founds Anthropic$124M
Leaves OpenAI with his sister Daniela and five colleagues.
2023 · age 40
Claude launches
Amazon and Google later invest billions.
2025 · age 42
Anthropic valued at $183B$183B
In the company's Series F round.

Sources

Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.