SAN FRANCISCO — Daniela Amodei has an energy that’s hard to place — warm, unhurried, immediately present. She swept into a sunlit room on the ground floor of Anthropic’s headquarters in December, sat down, and immediately apologized for her mug.
“Is my, like, gigantic novelty mug going to be distracting if I have it?” she said. “I’ll defer to the wise camera people in terms of what’s in the shot.”
It was a disarming kind of normal for someone operating at this level.
Five years ago, she and her brother, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, led an exodus from OpenAI.
They took a core group of senior researchers and started Anthropic with a contrarian bet: That safety and business success weren’t in tension, that the real money wasn’t in viral consumer products, and that the artificial intelligence race would be won by the company that knew when to slow down.
“We really just felt more like we were running towards something than running away from something,” Daniela said of the decision to leave.
The co-founders had known each other for years before OpenAI. Her brother and co-founders Tom Brown and Chris Olah worked together at Google Brain. Others overlapped at various labs.
Anthropic’s headquarters is on “AI Alley” in San Francisco, a 230,000-square-foot glass high-rise in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. The neighborhood is a corridor of startups and tech giants reshaping the American economy from a handful of downtown blocks.
Anthropic is now valued at $183 billion and on track to nearly double that, according to a newly signed term sheet, with Microsoft and Nvidia joining its cap table.
Revenue has grown ten times annually for three consecutive years, thanks in large part to the fact that the company’s AI assistant, Claude, has become the model of choice for enterprises that care about reliability as much as capability.
Daniela Amodei mentioned, almost in passing, that Claude once helped diagnose her with a bacterial infection after multiple doctors missed it.
With her human-scale, here-and-now energy, she is by most counts the opposite of the AI founder archetype personified by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Tesla/xAI CEO Elon Musk.
Even her brother is a version of the technical visionary who speaks in timelines to superintelligence and treats interviews like TED talks.
But Daniela Amodei is different.
If her brother is the one looking for a path to the horizon, she is pouring the foundation that lets him get there.
Anthropic vs. OpenAI
In November 2022, OpenAI fired the starting gun in the AI race. ChatGPT, a free chatbot anyone could talk to, went viral instantly, hitting 100 million users in two months.
Google scrambled. Microsoft went all in. The entire tech industry lurched into motion.
But Anthropic didn’t sprint.
From the start, Anthropic was defined by a contrarian posture toward OpenAI: move slower, ship later, and optimize for trust.
While ChatGPT became a flashy consumer toy, the Amodeis made a different bet. They believed that the real money wasn’t in viral moments, but in the less glamorous enterprise buildout behind them. It was in Fortune 500 contracts and developer tools and APIs sold to companies where reliability, security, and compliance are mission critical.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say that we knew for sure,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC about the enterprise bet. “Anthropic, as an organization, is well suited to be a B2B company. We really care about things like reliability and security and safety. That’s baked into our DNA.”
Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, said the AI frontier has shifted toward real work — coding, math, science — the kinds of tasks companies will actually pay for.
“The frontier isn’t about making our chat better,” he said, pointing to Anthropic’s strength with developers, where Claude has built a reputation as a top-tier programming model, outpacing key rivals in many users’ workflows.
Even back in 2020, Daniela Amodei said the team could see a future where Claude would handle many of the high-intelligence tasks humans do at work. “And we thought, that’s a pretty big market.”
Anthropic said its business customer base has grown from under 1,000 to more than 300,000 in two years, and nearly 80% of Claude activity now comes from outside the United States.
The customer list reads like a who’s who of global enterprise, with Novo Nordisk, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund — the world’s largest — plus Bridgewater, Stripe, and Slack, all running Claude at scale.
Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Ventures who invested in Anthropic, said the bet made sense for one simple reason: enterprise customers don’t churn the way consumers do.
“We really love the focus that they had, and candidly, the focus of Anthropic on safety and trust, we knew was going to play really well with the enterprise buyer, and that’s proven to be true.”
While OpenAI still leads in scale and cultural cachet, with ChatGPT a household name boasting nearly 900 million weekly active users, Anthropic is closing the gap fast — and in some areas is already ahead.
Today, Anthropic’s revenue is roughly 85% business. OpenAI is more than 60% consumer.
“One of the values and the things that we talk about a lot internally is just how not to believe the hype,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC. “For us, it’s never been about seeking attention or sort of being in the headlines. We’re really here to do the work.”
“As Anthropic goes, so goes generative AI,” said Alex Kantrowitz, founder of the independent publication Big Technology. “They have the most pure bet on this technology working. If Anthropic is able to make it work, all of GenAI is going to work. And if not, we’re going to have some serious problems.”
Anthropic’s lead in enterprise is proving durable. And it’s a lead the Amodei siblings have built together.
“It’s genuinely a privilege to run Anthropic with my sibling,” Daniela Amodei said. “We’ve known each other our whole lives — or my whole life, at least. He had four years without me, poor guy.”
“Dario and I really help each other,” she added. “He’s great at pushing me to think about the big picture… I am helpful in thinking about, like, how do we build an organization that is enduring, that’s sustainable, that’s filled with great people who really want to do the type of work that we set out to do five years ago.”
There’s always more work to do, Amodei said, and the models are getting exponentially smarter.
She framed it as a lesson from the last generation of tech: If social media companies could go back in time, knowing what their platforms would unleash, would they have done anything differently?
Anthropic, she said, is trying to answer that question now: “To talk about the risks and try to mitigate them” while it still can.
Daniela Amodei is betting it can. She’s built her whole company around that conviction.
Watch the video to learn more.
