Inside Anthropic, the $965 Billion AI Juggernaut | The Circuit

I love this library. It is,

It is, it is an absolutely beautiful library.

Are you a big reader? You know, I mean, I, I, I read a lot in general.

I don't know that I've had to that much time in, over the last year or so.

Dario Amodei is an unlikely AI celebrity.

He's known for warning the world about the risks of artificial intelligence.

Now, his company is an AI frontrunner valued at nearly a trillion dollars.

You're shipping so much, so fast. How are you doing that?

We use Claude, you know, across the product development cycle, and it allows us to release very fast.

Founded by a team of open AI defectors in 2021, Anthropic started out as an underdog lab.

Today it's the breakout star wiping billions in value off software stocks, going head-to-head with the Pentagon, and creating models allegedly powerful enough to burst through the walls of modern cybersecurity.

Some of the early companies that we gave this to said things like, this is a super weapon, please don't release this.

Guiding Anthropic through this is a sibling duo, Dario, the brother and visionary, and Daniela, the sister and operator who puts Dario's swirling cosmic thoughts into action.

Dario and I, we've always been really close since we were little, but I think we always really wanted to do something big together.

Okay, but when you argue who wins?

No one. No one.

As the AI arms race escalates, the Amodeis are eager to establish themselves as the good guys.

But Anthropic's technology could have profound implications for how humanity works, learns, thinks, even fights wars, enormous responsibilities for a young, fast-growing startup.

All of this technical safety research that we do, it's to make the products more aligned with human values to make sure that we're not building something that could cause societal issues that previous technology companies have accidentally caused.

The name Anthropic actually comes from the Greek word for human, which speaks to their mission to build responsible AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Can you actually do that when you're building the most powerful technology in the world?

You are at the center of the AI universe right now.

What does that feel like?

The experience I've had for my whole career, and certainly the whole time at Anthropic, is that there's this kind of smooth exponential, and the experience of the smooth exponential is, nothing's happening, nothing's happening, nothing's happening.

Little things happen, and then zoom, it goes crazy.

So, you know, I was watching this graph for a while and I said, oh yeah, we'll probably become the, you know, the, the AI company with, you know, the, the most revenue and the most valuation some sometime around this time.

And, and indeed, indeed, it has happened.

We're just keeping in mind all the things we usually keep in mind, you know, how do we train good models?

How do we put them in good products?

How do we make sure that everything's safe?

What were you like as a kid growing up in San Francisco?

I know your, your dad was a leather craftsman.

Your mom worked in libraries. How did that shape you?

You know, the whole, you know, like first, you know, internet revolution was happening around me and I had absolutely no interest in it.

I was just interested in like, doing math and like scrawl, you know, scrawling things.

I was interested in, like, you know, understanding the universe.

I was interested in science fiction.

I think I just felt a lot of curiosity about the world.

What was it like growing up with Dario?

- He was so smart.

He was taking, you know, calculus when he was, you know, in I think like middle school.

He took math classes at UC Berkeley, when he was in high school, I was actually more into to reading and arts.

So we were almost like complete compliments in that way.

Dario studied neuroscience before turning to AI at Baidu and later Google.

While Daniela started out as an early employee at Stripe.

They lived together in San Francisco, along with Daniela's husband, Holden Karnofsky.

Then in 2016, Dario joined the newly formed OpenAI followed by Daniela.

In 2018, the company began as a nonprofit that promised a safe, more open path to super intelligence.

I think we need to think right now about how we want this deployed, how everyone gets to benefit from it, how we're gonna govern it, how we're gonna make it safe and sort of good for humanity.

At OpenAI, Dario developed the concept of scaling laws, predicting that large language models would improve simply by adding more data and computing power, even if the underlying algorithm stayed the same At that point in time.

I know it sounds crazy now, looking back, not a lot of people believed, Hey, scale up is the way that these models are gonna get smarter and better.

That was sort of an unusual counter-cultural scientific perspective that I think was really held by our, you know, founding research team.

That approach helped supercharge open AI's models paving the way for chatGPT, but the Amodeis reportedly clashed with Altman over the company's direction and values.

Altman has said, for all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company.

Your decision to leave OpenAI has become Silicon Valley lore.

What did you disagree on?

Look, I'll, I'm gonna say it.

I'm gonna say it very simply.

There are many valid disagreements to be had on safety.

We certainly had some of those disagreements with them, but you know, people that, that, that, that alone is not sufficient to leave.

When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest, that makes it very hard to, you know, to continue to work with a company, to continue to trust the company.

And look, at the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them?

The way to resolve it is you go off and do your thing.

They go off and do their thing.

So this is Precita Park.

When Dario and Daniela decided to leave OpenAI to start Anthropic, this is where the early team would get together.

It was during the pandemic.

So the story goes, and a bunch of early employees would come here, they'd pull up a chair on the grass, they'd have lunch, and they'd talk about what they were building.

hen we started this company, there were seven co-founders of which me and Daniela are two.

And now, you know, we we're, we're the, we're the basically the only company in the space that has all of its co-founders still here.

You don't get to, you know, be a company of the size and scale that we are.

With that happening like that almost never happens.

From the start, Anthropic pitched itself as the ultimate safety conscious AI company.

Dario has published long essays with names like Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology musing on the miraculous potential of AI as well as the worst case scenarios.

Anthropic's chatbot Claude has been trained to follow a set of principles called a Constitution intended to keep it on the straight and narrow.

Claude has a very distinct style and feel a human name.

What are you trying to convey?

I think when people interact with Claude versus, you know, other systems, there is more of a feeling of, I like to describe it as professional warmth.

So the goal is not for it to be your best friend, but it's not for it to be sort of cold, rote, calculating.

It should feel approachable, but distant, right? Professional.

Anthropic has talked about teaching Claude to be good.

What is a good model? What is a bad model?

You don't want a model that lies accidentally or intentionally, right?

Lying, we call hallucinations. It makes something up.

The models are just trained to predict the next word.

So sometimes they don't know and they just invent something.

Models sometimes, as we've shown in our research, can purposely try to deceive you.

We have to make sure that doesn't happen in production models that we expose to customers.

And then there's a lot of work around harmlessness, just making sure that the model is not accidentally producing, you know, information that is wrong or harmful or, or could cause someone to do something bad Whose values are being put into Claude.

Like is there a universal good?

There's so many religions, so many different beliefs, like how do you even decide that?

So of course there's no universal standard for what makes something helpful or harmless, but there are founding documents in human history, like the UN Declaration of Human Rights that we can use to train Claude's character.

And I think, you know, interestingly on the religious front, we've actually started to have a lot of conversations with religious leaders around how should we think about, you know, Claude, the entity, and how can we bake in some of the kind of core values that are consistent across religions types of belief that really just transcend, you know, a specific worldview, but that are really, that human beings have been grappling with for, for millennia.

Have you tried to give Claude a trait that didn't take, or was there any trait that emerged that surprised you?

I think in the early days, it's funny to look back on them now, the kind of early Claudes, Claude two era, sometimes Claude would be almost a little bit nannyish.

Claude was like, I'm really concerned about you.

And you're like, Claude, I was asking for the weather, right?

It was like there was something really benign.

Thankfully we didn't, you know, release most of, most of the most egregious versions of those.

But I think it is, you know, it is, when you think about it, it's like tuning a dial.

And so our researchers have this very fine needle to thread in order to land at the center of that.

Whatever Anthropic is doing with Claude, it seems to be working.

Anthropic's revenue has skyrocketed over the past year, making the company profitable for the first time.

That's largely thanks to the company's focus on more lucrative business tools.

Claude Code, a major leap that automated large chunks of software engineering and Claude Cowork, which gave that power to everyone else.

Now, early on, others focused on fund splashy consumer apps.

You made a bet on coding and enterprise.

Why did you make that bet?

Was it a, was it a values decision or a business decision?

Look, if you pick a business model that fundamentally conflicts with your values, you're gonna have a hard time, right?

Either you betray your own values or you become irrelevant.

And so when we thought about it, we said, look, you know, we've seen the world of social media, the consumer world.

It, it really seems to, you know, encourage engagement, even addiction, you know, the lop we've seen with AI video models, it's like, what's going on?

Is it wanna maximize the number of minutes that you're, you're paying attention to?

Because that's the advertising revenue-driven incentive.

Whereas if we look at enterprise, look, I mean, you know, we want to make these models useful to people.

We want to use AI to, you know, cure diseases that we couldn't cure before, right?

Well, that's working with biotech, it's working with pharma, it's working with academic research groups.

All of those are enterprises, right?

We want to use AI to like, you know, to make energy cheaper and more efficient.

That's, that's all enterprise.

And so I think it serves us well to have this business model that largely aligns with our values.

Soon after Claude Cowork was released, $285 billion in market value vanished overnight.

Traders called it the SaaSpocalypse.

This kind of white collar wipe out story in the software sector. Terrifying.

Some of those are down for nine days in a row.

So clearly the tension is building, If AI continues improving at this pace, how much of traditional software gets replaced and how fast.

I think with AI like the pie is getting bigger, right?

So the existing incumbents may be smaller in relative terms, some of them may, may go down in value, some of them may even may even go out of business if they don't, if they don't adapt in the right way.

But like, I would guess that the software industry gets not smaller, although there will be some big losers.

Those who don't kind of see what's coming, who don't identify the moats they have, they're gonna have a really hard time.

Anthropic's recent growth spurt might not have happened without this man.

Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork, when Anthropic hired him in 2024, Cherny was living a very different life in rural Japan.

There was a lot of farmer's markets, like very slow.

We were making miso. That was sort of the big hobby.

And I remember using the first AI chatbot that I'd ever used, and it just took my breath away and I was just like, oh my God, I have to, I have to just be a part of this.

And I, I'm also just such a big scifi reader and so I just know how bad this thing can go.

Like this technology is incredibly powerful and so we move, move back.

You created Claude Code, you led the development of Claude Cowork.

What problem were you trying to solve?

If you look at the coding products, they were all pretty simple.

It was like, it was sort of like, you know, like complete the word, complete the sentence.

That was the extent of AI in coding and we just wanted to make a way bigger bet.

And our bet was, we think actually a coding agent can do all of it.

A year and a half ago you wrote the code by hand and sometimes you press tab and it would auto complete a line.

Now I talk to my Claude and it writes the code and then while it does that, I talk to the next Claude and it writes some code.

And at any point I have either, you know, like a few Claudes running and up to a few thousand Claudes running, doing things.

How much code is Claude writing internally for engineers here?

It's writing almost all of it on my team.

So for me personally, it's been writing a hundred percent of my code for at least six months.

The work of engineering has just completely changed.

I feel like I suddenly have superpowers.

I have like a jet pack and the engineering has never been this fun.

Can we give C Claude a spin? Yeah, let's do this.

All right. Alright, so let's, let's make like a little recipe app.

So make a recipe app. What do you want it to do?

I would love it to suggest meals for the week.

So, you know, this is gonna take me a few minutes and let's, let's just see if CLaude builds this.

Ooh, it gave me some options. Hmm. Let's do these Look pretty tasty. Actually.

I could do a Greek chicken power bowl when I click on a recipe, I want it to show me how to do it.

Thank you. Aww.

I'm sure Claude appreciate I always try to say thank you.

Yeah, I always try to be nice too. I don't know, A recipe app might not be the most mind blowing demo of Anthropic's technology, but what Claude Code just did in minutes, used to take hours or days for some, that looks like a big opportunity.

Are you like nervous about next week or is it like..

What's next week? Your developer conference?

Oh! Yes, yes. There's so many things happening every week.

Year over year API volume is up nearly 17x on the cloud.

In the last 12 months, we've shipped eight frontier models to developers and users comments.

Welcome to the second annual Code with Claude conference, where Claude superfans come hoping to get a glimpse of the future.

We're having a lot of fun. There's a ton of adrenaline.

This is the first year we've grown faster than the exponential.

In the first quarter of this year, we saw, if you were to annualize it a 80x growth per year.

Ooh. I use Claude every day in the form of Claude Code to do all sorts of stuff. Not just write code.

of stuff. Not just write code.

I write way more code than I did five years ago.

I've got the confidence of I know a 22-year-old with VC money. I'm not 22.

My friend invited me and it's been, it's amazing.

As someone that's not really technical, I think it's really interesting just to see what everyone's working on, what's out there.

I think the, the concerning part or the, and the exciting part is hey, they can do things that are we couldn't dream of and timelines we couldn't ever expect.

But the kind of alternate side of that reality is you really have to be prepared because they will really be a thousand times more productive.

All of this raises an obvious question.

Will engineers be the first casualties of the AI they're building?

It's been revenge of the nerds for a while? Is that over?

I think we all become nerds, But what happens to the actual nerds?

I think the actual nerds will, they're they have to figure it out.

Yeah. I I think for a lot of them, the skill that they had before is gonna help them in the future because they sort of have a pretty big headstart.

They do a lot of things that are not coding.

And engineers also have to talk to users.

They have to plan, they have to think about what's next.

So I, I think these are still parts of engineering that are gonna stick around.

Silicon Valley may have AI fever, but elsewhere the mood is less upbeat.

70% of Americans think AI will kill jobs and nearly a third worry, theirs will be one of them.

Dario Amodei has been outspoken about this issue and some of his predictions don't exactly sound reassuring.

I think we could have this very unusual combination of very fast GDP growth and high unemployment, or at least underemployment or, you know, low wage job.

A lot of low wage jobs, high inequality.

You've been really direct about job loss.

AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.

That was a year ago. AI has moved incredibly fast.

Is it still 50% or is it higher?

I don't know exactly, but I'm, I'm still, I'm still pretty concerned.

I'm still the same order of concerns.

You know, we are seeing right now that AI is making people more productive.

But that's the usual hump.

You automate 90% of the job, great people are 10 times more productive in the other 10% 'cause they're 10 times more leveraged.

But eventually it gets close to a hundred percent.

Now the sequel to that is, well then you have to find something else for them to do.

Right now AI makes the software engineers more productive, even though AI writes all the code or almost all the code.

But we're already starting to see the beginning of like, you know, there may be some people that it's, it's not making more productive, that it's better for the AI to just to just do the thing.

How does that sit with you?

It's, it's very uncomfortable. Yeah.

I I think this is, this is the reason why I chose to go to Anthropic and I think this is the reason that a lot of people here chose to go here is artificial intelligence is this force that is far bigger than we are.

But here we can hopefully make it go a little bit better.

Do you feel like it's your job to do something about that?

Or is that someone else's problem?

I think it's a thing that we have to talk about.

We have to advocate for it.

Ultimately, it's up to society to solve it.

This is bigger than one company.

There has been a lot of pushback on, you know, your, and I know you've said you're trying to warn people, but that, you know, you're, you know, Jensen Huang said, you're conflating tasks with jobs.

AI is creating jobs.

Anybody who's saying that AI is wiping out jobs is scaring people.

Other folks have said this, you know, it's sort of doom marketing that benefits anthropic. So,

So I wanna be really clear and push back hard against this.

In every interview I talk about the, the possible ways to address these risks from tax and macroeconomic policy to what the new jobs are in the adolescence of technology.

I have like five pages where I lay out the difference between tasks and jobs.

Why this time is different than other times, but social media, which I detest, which I detest as a category.

People have these three second clips from, you know, from a year ago.

I've, I've written much more carefully about these things where, where I talk about the risks.

So these are this, this, the idea that this is cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing.

I think it's, it's part of the disease of Silicon Valley.

It's been caught up in this social media world of, of, of three seconds.

And so my message is just definitely not doom is coming.

My message is like, this is something, you know, that we should see coming, that we're worried about and that we need to actually respond to positively Beyond the software industry, the potential impact of AI on jobs seems harder to predict.

Anthropic has published a paper estimating which fields could make the most use of AI in the near future.

If its predictions are right, management, finance, and legal jobs could soon look very different.

Which jobs go away, who gets replaced and what new jobs are created.

So no one knows for sure because you know, the economy's unpredictable, right?

The thing that that we have going for us here is the pie is gonna expand a lot.

And so because the pie is gonna expand a lot, there are probably going to be places where people can go.

It's just a matter of finding them fast enough. And

So play this out for me a little bit.

You know, you wake up in five years, you know, what does this country look like?

What are those people doing? Yeah.

So 'cause if there's that much unemployment, is that not how revolutions start?

Yeah, no, this is the outcome we wanna prevent.

This is absolutely the outcome we want to prevent.

I think there's a few places, none of them are guaranteed.

We're not sure, but there's the physical world, we need a lot of more people to make, build, manufacture things in the physical world.

Anything that's human centered, I think that's gonna be a big deal, right?

People, or at least some people wanna talk to humans.

So these kind of human relationship driven jobs, like, I think those are gonna be important and I think there'll be some effort by the humans to kind of direct the ai right at, at some level it has to be in line with someone's values and someone's intentions and, and so I, I think there's gonna be some role there, although I don't know how thin versus how thick it will be.

I think I feel a little bit more hopeful that humans will continue to find ways to leverage AI to be productive, to do the parts of the work that are meaningful to us that only humans can do.

I think the human to human interaction will never fully go away.

The example I often reach for is, is what will happen in medicine today.

We hire doctors who are expert diagnosticians.

I think AI is gonna soon be pretty good at telling you what the suite of options of things that are wrong with you and what tests to run.

And you won't need a doctor to do that.

But an AI can't physically examine you and say, Hey, does it hurt when I press, you know, here.

They can't have a bedside manner with you that says like, tell me how you're feeling about this.

How are you, how are you coping with going through this process?

And I think we're going to pivot something like medicine to be much more focused on the interpersonal because the diagnostic tools are going to become much better.

But the interpersonal human part, that's, that's not gonna change.

AI is a technology that touches almost every part of life.

So there's more to get into a lot more. Next time,

Ai and the future of warfare, Anthropic's scarily powerful new model Mythos and riding the exponential while avoiding dystopia.

I understand one of your favorite books is The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

That is correct. Do you see parallels between yourself and Oppenheimer?

The figure I most identified with was Leo Szilard who was the one who first had the idea that there could be a chain reaction.

Look, my view is we're, we're not gonna get through this with like larger than life personalities or like figures who try and be at the center of everything.

In some ways actually see Oppenheimer as a failure case, as what should not happen.

There's a lot of powerful actors who have interests here and the only way it's gonna end well for everyone is if there is some, there's basically checks and balances everywhere.