Many people told Dario and Daniela Amodei that starting Anthropic with seven cofounders was a terrible idea.
Yet, more than five years later, the duo said that setup is crucial to their success. The siblings made the comments in an episode of the podcast The Builders, released on Tuesday and recorded in July.
“They all have equal stakes in the company, and they all carry the vision. We have inherent trust in all of them,” Dario Amodei, the CEO, said.
He said later in the episode that mutual trust is crucial to resolving his frequent disagreements with other cofounders on high-stakes questions, like what safeguards to apply to a model and how to lobby for regulations.
“These are all good-faith disagreements, but they always get resolved because there’s always trust that everyone is trying to get to the right answer and everyone is being honest,” he said, drawing a contrast to what he said was his previous experience working at OpenAI.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, said the focus on honesty also extends to how the leaders communicate with employees.
“Honesty and integrity and how we treat each other and our employees is also reflective of how we want the technology to be built,” she said.
The podcast was released one day after Anthropic released its S-1 paperwork as it prepares to go public. As Henry Chandonnet wrote for Business Insider, the paperwork was chock full of language about honesty being central to the company’s public persona.
Under a unique governance structure, as outlined in the S-1, the company’s seven founders will control 50.1% of all shareholder votes, meaning the seven cofounders will have more voting power than all other shareholders combined. In addition to their voting power, the cofounders also hold significant stakes in the company and stand to earn billions. Each of the cofounders has pledged to donate 80% of their personal equity in the company to philanthropy.
Anthropic’s highly anticipated S-1 paperwork also revealed key financial statistics: The company had a net loss of $42 billion and revenue of $4.6 billion last year, five customers drove around a quarter of revenue in the first nine months of the year, and the Amodeis together had total compensation packages valued at around $35 million last year. More than 90 pages of the S-1 outline risk factors, and Anthropic warned that a “catastrophic AI-related incident” could overwhelm the entire insurance industry.
The AI behemoth is expected to target a $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation when it debuts on the Nasdaq in November, potentially making it the largest IPO ever. Some investing experts have expressed concern that the market may struggle to absorb another blockbuster IPO.
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