Meet Dario Amodei, CEO of the (soon to be) $170 Billion AI Startup

Daily Grind July 30, 2025: Tech's morning newsletter. Featuring one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to start your day

Author

Ben Putano
July 30, 2025

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Grind for Wednesday, July 30.

Big news is on the horizon for Anthropic, and with it, an excellent profile on its CEO from the Substack, Big Technology. That’s our featured headline for the day.

Plus, we’ll talk death with Steve Jobs in our One Page, then try to dig into our personal motivations with our One (actually two) Question.

Let’s get into it!

📰 One Headline: Meet Dario Amodei, the CEO of the (soon to be) $170 Billion AI Startup

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Dario Amodei broke into AI in the 2010s working with Baidu. There, he helped to develop the ubiquitous Scaling Laws of AI, which suggested that adding more data, compute, and power to AI models predictably improved their performance.

After the Baidu team broke apart, he remained on the cutting edge by moving to OpenAI, where he led the development of GPT-3, the first truly functional LLM.

But Amodei saw the future—a future where AI became so powerful that it posed a risk to its creators, and the rest of us. And Amodei believed the leaders at OpenAI were not taking these risks seriously enough (ironic, given OpenAI was founded to build safe AI).

That’s when Amodei and a team of colleagues founded Anthropic, an AI company with human interests at heart (the name itself refers to the continued existence of human life).

Anthropic is best known for its most popular product: Claude, the chatbot that rivals ChatGPT and (some say) outperforms it on tasks like coding and writing with empathy (I agree with the latter).

Yesterday, the Substack Big Technology released a massive and comprehensive profile of Dario Amodei, his life before Anthropic, and his vision for the future. It is well-worth a full read, but I will share my takeaways below.

Driven by Death

Dario Amodei is driven by the premature death of his father, who had a rare medical condition. Within 4 years, a medical breakthrough flipped the disease from 50% fatal to 95% curable. If only research had sped up just a bit, his father could have been saved.

There was someone who worked on the cure to this disease, that managed to cure it, and save a bunch of people's lives,” Amodei says, “but could have saved even more.”

Anthropic is B2B — ChatGPT is B2C

Anthropic is fundamentally a B2B company—most of its money is made from its API, which other companies use to employ Anthropic models in their own products and businesses.

But Claude—and especially Claude Code—has put a public, consumer-facing spotlight on the startup.

The company released its Claude chatbot in July 2023, nearly a year after ChatGPT’s debut, and it drew rave reviews due to its high-EQ personality (an outgrowth of Anthropic’s safety work).

The company, until then, had sought to remain under 150 employees, but soon found itself hiring more people in a day than it employed in total in its entire first year. “It was that Claude chatbot moment when the company started to grow a lot,” [Amodei colleague Jack] Clark says.

Balancing Speed and Safety

Part of Anthropic’s strategy is to focus on AI coding to help speed up progress in designing and training AI models.

But Amodei is also deeply concerned with AI safety. Having seen the power of AI first-hand, he wants to ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. That’s why he’s a vocal advocate for export controls to China for both AI models and hardware, like Nvidia chips. Other AI leaders, including OpenAI and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, call Amodei a doomer and hypocrite for this stance.

Amodei sees this line of questioning as rooted in the slow-it-down doomerism he’s often accused of. His plan, contrary to the critics, is to accelerate.

“The reason I'm warning about the risk is so that we don't have to slow down,” he says. “I have such an incredible understanding of the stakes. In terms of the benefits, in terms of what it can do, the lives that it can save. I've seen that personally.”

Anthropic is still fighting for its survival

The high costs of running AI models—especially for inference, or the process of AI models generating outputs to user prompts—is costing the company significantly. Some project the company is losing $3 billion a year.

Earlier this week, Anthropic announced rate limits on Claude Code. Some power users were getting thousands of dollars of usage for just $200/month.

Additionally, Anthropic is on the verge of raising another $5 billion on a valuation of $170 billion. It just raised $3.2B earlier this year.

As the checks grow larger, Anthropic’s investor options are shrinking, forcing Amodei to partner with less-than ideal backers.

Within Anthropic, Amodei has argued the Gulf states have $100 billion or more in capital to invest, and their cash would help Anthropic stay on the technology’s frontier. He seemed to reluctantly accept the idea of taking the money from dictators in an internal Slack message obtained by Wired. “Unfortunately,” he wrote. “I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”

The race for more efficient AI

Many companies are working to improve the cost and energy efficiency of running AI. On Monday, we featured the chip startup Positron, whose Inference-focused chips claim to use a fraction of the energy of those from leader Nvidia.

Anthropic currently uses custom AI chips from Amazon, which made a large investment in Anthropic.

The costs of AI will must eventually come down for Anthropic to become sustainable. While Amodei is confident they will, he is not 100% certain.

To this day, Amodei is perhaps the purest believer in the scaling laws among AI research leaders. While peers like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun suggest the AI industry needs further breakthroughs to reach human-level artificial intelligence, Amodei speaks with a certainty — though not complete — that the path forward is clear. And as the industry erects massive data centers the size of small cities, he sees exceptionally powerful AI fast approaching.

This grand war for AI dominance will end spectacularly, one way or another. Either companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google will unlock powerful, sustainable AI that will change the world forever—or these companies will flame out as performance flatlines and the money runs dry.

Amodei, driven by a deep-seeded and personal motivation, is leading the charge either way—and he wants to bring others along with him.

“The way I think about the race to the top is that it doesn't matter who wins,” Amodei says. “Everyone wins, right?”

Read the full story in Big Technology:

We have a lot of interesting stories to explore today:

📚 One Page: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I love bios and memoirs, and the piece on Dario Amodei reminded me of one of my favorites: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Like Amodei, Jobs was animated by death—not of a family members’, but his own. After battling cancer before his 50th birthday, Jobs reflected on his mortality and the clarity it gave him. He summed up the power of death in his famous commencement speech at Stanford.

This page from the biography recounts that speech and reminds us to Momento Mori (remember you will die):

Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. And that was the approach Jobs chose. “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”

The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple turned out to be good for him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” The students were unusually attentive, despite a plane circling overhead with a banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale that enthralled them. It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it brought:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

❓ One Question: What drives you?

I already shared a question about death in a previous Daily Grind, and while that would fit here today, let’s focus more generally on our motivations.

Put simply: What drives you? 

The next time you feel an urge of motivation, stop to think: what is causing this? Is it a desire to help, a need to prove yourself, a deep-seeded curiosity, or something else?

Another way to consider this question comes from Clayton Christensen: How will you measure your life? 

Your answer to that question is likely your driving force.

🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:

That’s it for today’s Daily Grind! Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.

As always, your feedback is appreciated. And if you liked this post, please share with one friend!

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