Meet Anthropic’s Seven Founders as the A.I. Firm Prepares for an IPO

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is preparing to go public in a debut that could value it at $2 trillion and become the largest-ever initial public offering. That would turn the San Francisco start-up’s seven founders, who left OpenAI to create Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI executives over how A.I. should be built, into the latest tech billionaires.

Here’s a who’s who of Anthropic’s founders:

Dario Amodei

Dr. Amodei, 43, is the chief executive of Anthropic. In the past year, he clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the use of A.I. in autonomous lethal weapons and for mass domestic surveillance, and has been at odds with other tech leaders over whether A.I. should be openly shared or tightly controlled.

In a 3,800-word essay in September, Dr. Amodei called for a global slowdown of A.I. development. Weeks later, he had a private dinner with President Trump and attended a luncheon the president hosted with other A.I. leaders.

Dr. Amodei grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District with his younger sister, Daniela, who is also an Anthropic founder. Their father, who died when Dr. Amodei was in his early 20s, was a leather craftsman, and their mother managed renovation projects for libraries in San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif. The siblings attended Lowell High School in San Francisco.

Dr. Amodei studied physics at the California Institute of Technology and transferred to Stanford to finish his undergraduate degree. He attended Princeton for a doctorate in biophysics and computational neuroscience as a Hertz fellow and later returned to the Bay Area as a postdoctoral researcher focused on “trying to improve diagnostics and curing cancer” at Stanford’s School of Medicine, he told The New York Times’s Ross Douthat in February.