A Conversation with Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President of Anthropic

**David Stiepleman** (0:11)
Hi everybody, welcome back to the San Francisco season of It's Not Magic, our podcast from Sixth Street. We invite influential leaders and founders to get to the core of how they're creating innovative solutions to stand out in their industries. San Francisco, we've got a motto, we say it all starts here, and it does. Music, culture, food, tech, and not incidentally Sixth Street. This season, we've been focusing on the leaders driving the renewed momentum shaping our city's future. And it's not just magic, as we say, we're excited to dive in to the vision, grit, and the people making it happen.

**Daniela Amodei** (0:47)
It feels very important that we sort of have this concept of a human in the loop to also just make sure that the models are not kind of veering into a direction that we don't want them to be. Are we letting the models be 100% fully autonomous for tasks, or is there a process of being able to kind of bring humans and AI together? Hold Light and Shade is one of our values, and it's this concept that the technology itself has great risk and great opportunity, and that that is a very complicated, complex thing to hold, right? We have to consider and talk about all of the risks, all the things that could go wrong, while also considering thinking about and building towards a world where all of the things go right. My sense is given the locus of the technology industry being here, a kind of orientation towards creativity, it doesn't surprise me that artificial intelligence first took off in the Bay Area. There's accountability that the non-tech residents of San Francisco kind of put on the technology companies that I don't necessarily think is bad, right? They're like, hey, we're providing a home for you, we just want you to be good citizens. Over the course of the past few years, there's been a lot more mutual understanding between what I'm describing as kind of old time San Francisco and tech.

**David Stiepleman** (1:57)
That's Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of Anthropic. If you're paying even passing attention to AI, and you definitely should be, you know Anthropic. Their founding group broke away from OpenAI to start a more human-centered AI company. They're famous for promulgating a responsible scaling policy for Claude, their next-gen AI assistant. Like many of our guests this season, Daniela was born and raised in San Francisco, and so was Anthropic. They were founded in 2021 as a Public Benefit Corporation, and Anthropic's become one of the fastest growing tech companies in history, embodying San Francisco's spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. Beyond the millions of people who use Claude, Anthropic serves over 300,000 business customers from Fortune 500 companies to startups, and they employ thousands of people, including 1,300 people right here in San Francisco. Anthropic actually just announced it's taking over an entire 27-story tower in downtown San Francisco to support its growth. In fact, since we recorded this conversation at the end of January, lots has happened because something crazy and dramatic happens about every 10 minutes in AI. On February 5th, Anthropic released its newest model, Opus 4.6, and reports from software engineers are that their new model and OpenAI's new model, they're another major leap forward doing the technical parts of their jobs, not just adequately, but very well and very quickly. These revelations and the excitement and anxiety that come with them, they rippled through markets over the last two weeks as Capital tries to figure out what all this means. You're seeing OpenAI and Anthropic back-competing superpacks gearing up for this election cycle, effectively staking out ground over weather and how we should regulate AI. And the rest of us were watching with combined wonder and fear at the possibilities at the risks we're trying to understand. So this is a super interesting moment to sit down with Daniela in the library at Anthropics headquarters in San Francisco. Look, we talked about a lot of different things, including how you create products with a strong emphasis on responsibility and safety, actively addressing the potential dangers of AI and how you measure if any of that's working. We talked about what Anthropic is seeing in terms of adoption in different regions within the United States and across the globe, and how you encourage more consistent adoption. We talked about when is the industry supposed to insist on being regulated. We talked about Daniela's experience as a musician. We talked about books, how generalists and specialists get the best out of each other, how you preserve culture amid really rapid growth. And we talked about why we're all very long and optimistic on San Francisco. If you're tuning in to learn the latest trick that AI can do, forget it, you already missed it. Instead, this is an interesting conversation with an interesting person in a very important seat, set in a vibrant downtown in a beautiful city. Kind of cool moment, I guess, and I think you'll enjoy the conversation.